Abstract
The disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 ushered in a new era in relations between all the members of a reunited continent. There were unprecedented changes in the domestic politics of the three Slavic republics, and in their relations with the states that had formerly been their military and ideological adversaries. Their efforts to negotiate a new relationship with ‘Europe’ were complicated by the far-reaching changes that had been taking place at the same time within what had originally been a European Economic Community, but which became a European Community and then a European Union in 1993 after the Maastricht Treaty had been ratified by all of its member states. The original six members became nine in 1973, ten in 1981, twelve in 1986, and fifteen in 1995. A much more fundamental process of change began in 2004 when eight formerly communist-ruled states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic republics) became full members, as well as Malta and Cyprus, followed in 2007 by Bulgaria and Romania and in 2013 by Croatia; four other countries were officially recognised as candidates. A series of internal reforms had meanwhile established an economic and monetary union with a common currency — the euro — that began to circulate in 1999. A common foreign and security policy was introduced by the Maastricht Treaty, replacing a European political cooperation framework that had been established in 1986; and the 2007 Lisbon treaty gave the Union a ‘legal personality’, which meant it had the right to adopt laws and treaties.
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Notes
N. Melikova, ‘“Eti lyudi privnesli v Evrosoyuz dukh primitivnoi rusofobii” [Interv’yu s Sergeem Yastrzhembskim]’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 November 2004, pp. 1, 6, at p. 6. Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister after this date, had the same experience. The new member countries had promised not to dwell on their ‘past experience’ when they received the security of NATO and EU membership, he told a US television interviewer, but ‘what happened was quite the opposite’: they had made a series of unfounded accusations in order to ‘stir up some kind of confrontation’ (
S. V. Lavrov, Mezhdu proshlym i budushchim. Rossiiskaya diplomatiya v menyayushchemsya mire (Moscow: Olma, 2011), p. 574; the interview was on 22 September 2010).
V. N. Likhachev, Rossiya i sovremennyi miroporyadok (Moscow: Veche, 2007), p. 240 (Likhachev was Russia’s EU representative from 1998 to 2003).
Mark Leonard and Nicu Popescu, A Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2007), p. 2. Other classifications are reviewed in
Anke Schmidt-Felzmann, With or Without the EU? Understanding EU Member States’ Motivations for Dealing with Russia at the European or the National Level (PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2011), pp. 50–52.
Vladiimr Solov’ev, ‘Rossiya vyvela Gruziyu na sebya’, Kommersant, 9 August 2008, p. 2.
Aleksandr Gabuev, ‘NATO stavit Rossiyu blok’, Kommersant, 20 August 2008, p. 6.
Calculated from E. M. Rakovskaya, ‘Geograficheskoe polozhenie i granitsy’, in A. D. Nekilepov et al., eds, Novaya rossiiskaya entsiklopediya, 12 vols, vol. 1: Rossiya (Moscow: Entsiklopediya, 2003), pp. 7–10, at p. 7.
S. V. Kortunov, Sovremennaya vneshnyaya politika Rossii. Strategiya izbiratel’noi vov-lechennosti (Moscow: Vysshaya shkola ekonomiki, 2009), pp. 250, 253, 256. For a wider range of opinion, see
Leonid Karabeshkin and Christian Wellmann, The Russian Domestic Debate on Kaliningrad: Integrity, Identity and Economy (Münster: Lit, 2004). One of the reasons the negotiations were ‘particularly troublesome’, according to the EU’s former commissioner for external relations, was because ‘Mrs Putin herself came from Kaliningrad’ (
Chris Patten, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 204).
See, for instance, Jakub Kulhanek, ‘The fundamentals of Russia’s EU policy’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 57, no. 5 (September–October 2010), pp. 51–63.
Igor’ Ivanov, ‘Rossiya i Evropa: vozmozhen li proryv v otnosheniyakh?’, Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 1 (2012), pp. 2–14, at p. 7.
Although commonly attributed to Kissinger (see, for instance, Antony Jay, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 221), the remark is apparently apocryphal (see
Gideon Rachman, ‘Kissinger never wanted to dial Europe’, 22 July 2009, at http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2009/07/kissinger-never-wanted-to-dial-europe/#axzz1S5ynd1VN, last accessed 6 July 2012). Kissinger himself thought the remark had originally been made by an Irish foreign minister, but it was a ‘good statement so why not take credit for it?’ (
Vanessa Gera, ‘Kissinger says calling Europe quote not likely his’, Associated Press, 27 June 2012, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/kissinger-says-calling-europe-quote-not-likely-his, last accessed 20 August 2012).
Ol’ga Butorina, ed., Evropeiskaya integratsiya (Moscow: Delovaya literatura, 2011), pp. 140, 142.
For a discussion of these issues, see Henn-Jüri Uibopuu, ‘International legal personality of union republics of the U.S.S.R.’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4 (October 1975), pp. 811–845, and more fully in the same author’s Die Völkererechtssubjektivität der Unionsrepubliken der UdSSR (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1975).
For the text, see Ministerstvo Inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Vneshnyaya politika Rossii. Sbornik dokumentov: 1990–1992 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1996), pp. 29–33, at p. 29.
Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 650.
International lawyers have generally divided into those who favour the ‘constitutive’ approach in such matters and the perhaps larger numbers who favour a ‘declaratory’ approach in terms of which the ‘recognition of a new State is a political act, which is, in principle, independent of the existence of the new State as a subject of international law’ (James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 22). The implications of the demise of the USSR from the point of view of international law are considered more closely in Zigmund Stankevich, Istoriya krusheniya SSSR: politiko-pravovye aspekty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 2001),
Petr P. Kremnev, Raspad SSSR: mezhdunarodno-pravovye problemy (Moscow: Zertsalo-M, 2005), and the same author’s Raspad SSSR i pravopreemstvo gosudarstv (Moscow: Yurlitinform, 2012), which argues that the USSR should be seen as having ‘ended its existence’ on 21 December and that all the union republics (including the Baltic republics) should be seen as successor states (pp. 5–6).
Ibid. On these distinctions, see Rein Mullerson, ‘The continuity and succession of states, by reference to the former USSR and Yugoslavia’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3 (July 1993), pp. 473–493. As we have noted (in note 12), this interpretation has not been universally accepted.
A. Blinov and P. Golub, ‘SShA stali 37-i stranoi, priznavshei nezavisimost’ Litvy, Latvii, Estonii’, Izvestiya, 3 September 1991, p. 3.
Goskomstat, Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik. Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Logos, 1996), p. 116.
M. S. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 2 vols (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), vol. 2, p. 613.
Alexander Frenz, The European Commission’s Tacis Programme 1991–2006. A Success Story (Brussels: n.p., 2006), available online at http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/neighbourhood/regional-cooperation/enpi-east/documents/annual_pro-grammes/tacis_success_story_final_en.pdf, last accessed 30 June 2014, p. 2.
Leon Brittan, A Diet of Brussels. The Changing Face of Europe (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 179.
Elena Visens, ‘Dva partnerstva v nedelyu’, Segodnya, 23 June 1994, p. 1.
Aleksandr Sychev, ‘Evropeiskii Soyuz predostavlyaet nam dve s polovinoi svobody’, Izvestiya, 13 May 1994, p. 3.
Laure Delcour, La politique de l’Union Européenne en Russie (1990–2000). De l’assistance au partenariat? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), p. 13. A similar view is taken in
Judith Marquand, Development Aid in Russia. Lessons from Siberia (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 50.
Heinz Timmerman, ‘Relations between the EU and Russia: the Agreement on Partnership and Co-operation’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 1996), pp. 196–223, at p. 221.
George Brock, ‘EU tells Yeltsin he must wait for full membership’, The Times, 25 June 1994, p. 14.
Lionel Barber, David Gardner and Kerin Hope, ‘Worst of all worlds as EU leaders fail to agree’, Financial Times, 27 June 1994, p. 2.
Diplomaticheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1992), pp. 12–13. The USSR had in fact applied for NATO membership as far back as 1954, in very different circumstances (see N. Kochin, ‘A history of two notes, or why the USSR did not become a NATO member’, International Affairs (Moscow), vol. 55, no. 2 (2009), pp. 177–191).
There are numerous accounts of the continuing conflict, including most recently John Russell, Chechnya — Russia’s ‘War on Terror’ (London and New York: Routledge, 2007),
Tony Wood, Chechnya: The Case for Independence (London and New York: Verso, 2007),
James Hughes, Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and a comprehensive documentary collection, Pervaya Chechenskaya, Vtoraya Chechenskaya, ed. N. N. Grodnensky (Minsk: Bukmaster, 2012). On human rights aspects, see particularly
Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Bulletin, no. 12 (1996), p. 16. A formal peace treaty was signed the following year by Yeltsin and Maskhadov, now the elected Chechen president (Kommersant-daily, 13 May 1997, pp. 1 and 4, which reproduced the very brief text). According to one careful analysis, at least 46,500 lives had been lost in the first Chechen war, the great majority (35,000) civilians; see John B. Dunlop, ‘How many soldiers and civilians died during the Russo-Chechen war of 1994–1996?’, Central Asian Survey, vol. 19, nos 3–4 (September–December 2000), pp. 328–338, at p. 338.
Vladimir Putin, ‘Why we must act’, New York Times, 14 November 1999, p. 15.
Novaya gazeta, no. 31 (20 July 2000), p. 7. The first full Russian translation of Samuel Huntington’s celebrated article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 appeared as S. Khantington, ‘Stolknovenie tsivilizatsii?’, Polis, no. 1, 1994, pp. 33–48; Putin made it clear elsewhere that he rejected the idea of a ‘war of civilisations’, for instance, in his speech to the German Bundestag (Diplomaticheskii vestnik, no. 10 (2001), at p. 47).
In the words of its founding father, the ‘main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power’ (Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, revised 5th edn (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 5).
Kommersant, 29 September 2001, p. 2. The Russian president, Schröder wrote later in his memoirs, had refected ‘very intensively’ on Russian-European relations, and ‘had a Western outlook’ (denkt abendländisch) for reasons that included his genuine religious convictions (Gerhard Schröder, Entscheidungen. Mein Leben in der Politik (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 2006), p. 457).
David Gowan, How the EU Can Help Russia (London: Centre for European Reform, 2000), p. 11.
Diplomaticheskii vestnik, no. 8 (2004), p. 11. The ENP as such could ‘raise no objections on the Russian side’, explained a deputy foreign minister, but Russia did ‘not regard itself either as an object or subject of this policy’; their relations with the EU were based on a larger ‘strategic partnership’ (Vladimir Chizhov, ‘Rossiya-ES. Strategiya partnerstva’, Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 9 (2004), pp. 23–39, at pp. 30–31).
Quoted in Oleg Komotsky, ‘Kuda zavedut “dorozhnye karty”?’, Novye izvestiya, 11 May 2005, p. 4.
Artem Mal’gin, ‘Karty est’. Kuda idem — neyasno’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 23 May 2005, p. 15.
Dmitrii Danilov, ‘Dorozhnye karty, vedushchie v nikuda’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 May 2005, p. 10.
Sergei Kulik and Igor’ Yurgens, “Partnerstvo dlya modernizatsii.” Rossiya-ES: k probleme realizatsii (Moscow: Institut sovremennogo razvitiya, November 2011), at http://www.insor-russia.ru/fles/Russia-ES_partnership.pdf, last accessed 6 September 2012, pp. 5 and 10.
Natal’ya Alekseeva, ‘Pyatiletka dlya viz’, Izvestiya, 6 June 2011, p. 2.
Concerns of this kind were particularly apparent in Finland and the Baltic states, according to an interview in the Finnish Ministry of Internal Affairs (Konstantin Volkov, ‘ES ne khochet otmeny viz dlya rossiyan’, Izvestiya, 30 July 2012, p. 7).
‘Naibolee estestvennym orientirom nam viditsya Sochi-2014’, interview with Vladimir Chizhov, Moskovskie novosti, 4 June 2012, p. 4. An additional complication was that the Schengen agreement, covering visa-free travel, did not apply to two of the EU’s member states (Ireland and the United Kingdom) but included four non-members (Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland). The liberalisation of visa arrangements had originally been proposed by Putin in 2002 in connection with the discussions that were taking place on travel between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia:
Yulia Sychugova, ‘Bezvizovyi dialog Rossiya-ES’, Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 7 (June 2012), pp. 121–132, at pp. 122–123.
Vladimir Putin, ‘Rossiya i menyayushchiisya mir’, Moskovskie novosti, 27 February 2012, pp. 1, 4–6, at p. 5.
Vitalii Petrov, ‘Rossiya gotova bystree’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 5 June 2012, p. 2.
Gailmova, ‘Khotite’. The visa dialogue was ‘developing well’, he told Russian journalists at the start of a later summit, but it would be ‘counterproductive’ to specify a date by which it would be completed (Elena Chernenko, ‘Kontrproduktivno ustanivlivat’ datu vvedeniya bezvizovogo rezhima’, Kommersant, 21 March 2013, p. 7).
Nikolaus von Twickel, ‘No road map on EU visa deal’, Moscow Times, 18 November 2011, p. 1. According to the Federal Migration Service, about 40 per cent of Russia’s foreign passports contained no data of this kind: (Konstantin Volkov, ‘ES ne khochet otmeny viz dlya rossiyan’, Izvestiya, 30 July 2012, p. 7.
The text of the agreement is in Rossiiskaya gazeta, 1 August 2012, p. 19 (‘O ratifikatsii Soglasheniya mezhdu Rossiiskoi Federatsiei i Soedinennymi Shtatami Ameriki ob uproshcheniya vizovykh formal’nostei dlya grazhdan Rossiiskoi Federatsii i grazhdan Soedinennykh Shtatov Ameriki’, 28 July 2012). The US Embassy in Moscow announced that the new arrangements would apply from 9 September 2012 (Aleksandr Voronov and Sergei Solov’ev, ‘Amerika prodlila vizy rossiyanam’, Kommersant, 31 August 2012, p. 5).
Anastasiya Savinykh, ‘Soyuz s Evrosoyuzom’, Izvestiya, 26 November 2010, p. 3 (reporting an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that had appeared the previous day).
Aleksandr Mineev, ‘Brak po nuzhde’, Novaya gazeta, 24 December 2012, p. 4.
Sergei Kulikov, ‘Rossiya i Evrosoyuz stolknulis’ statusami’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 December 2012, p. 1.
Viktoriya Prikhod’ko, ‘“Konets sveta” v Bryussele ne proshel darom dlya sammita Rossiya-ES’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 24 December 2012, p. 2.
This classification is based on Ol’ga Butorina, ed., Evropeiskaya integratsiya (Moscow: Delovaya literatura, 2011), pp. 684–685.
For the Commission’s proposals, see Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, Wider Europe — Neighbourhood: A New Framework for Relations with our Eastern and Southern Neighbours (Brussels, 11 March 2003, COM(2003) 104 final). On the ENP, more generally, see, for instance, Karen E. Smith, ‘The outsiders: The European Neighbourhood Policy’, International Affairs, vol. 81, no. 4 (July 2005), pp. 757–773;
Richard G. Whitman and Stefan Wolff, eds, The European Neighbourhood Policy in Perspective (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Elena Korosteleva, The European Union and its Eastern Neighbours. Towards a More Ambitious Partnership? (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012);
Teresa Cierco, The European Union Neighbourhood: Ten Years into the New Millennium (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); and
O. V. Shishkina, Vneshnepoliticheskie resursy. Rossiya i ES na prostranstve ‘obshchego sos-edstva’ (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2013). For a more critical perspective, see, for instance,
Dimitry Kochenov, ‘New developments in the European Neighbourhood Policy: Ignoring the problems’, Comparative European Politics, vol. 9, nos 4–5 (September-December 2011), pp. 581–595.
‘Joint Declaration of the Prague Eastern Partnership Summit, 7 May 2009’, Brussels, 8435/09 (Presse 78), at http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/09/st08/st08435.en09.pdf, last accessed 14 February 2013, p. 5. For a comprehensive discussion, see Elena Korosteleva, ed., Eastern Partnership: A New Opportunity for the Neighbours? (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012).
For ‘external governance’ see Sandra Lavenex, ‘EU external governance in “wider Europe”’, Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 11, no. 4 (August 2004), pp. 680– 700, at p. 683. ‘Not imperialist?’, commented David Cottle in the Wall Street Journal. ‘The EU just started a bit late’ (24 June 2011, p. 4). Indeed it was a term the EU itself was sometimes willing to employ. As Commission President Barroso put it, ‘Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empires. We have the dimension of Empire but there is a great difference. Empires were usually made with force with a centre imposing diktat, a will on the others. Now what we have is the first non-Imperial empire … I believe it is a great construction and we should be proud of it’ (p. 4).
Georgia announced its intention to withdraw in August 2008 and formally did so a year later: Vladimir Solov’ev, ‘Gruziya ob’yavlena nesodruzhestvennoi stranoi’, Kommersant, 18 August 2009, p. 5.
Aleksei Kudrin, ‘EvrAzES prevratitsya v odnu iz ustoichivykh mirovykh zon eko-nomicheskogo rosta’, Izvestiya, 25 March 2008, p. 14; for the text of the agreement, see ‘Dogovor ob uchrezhdenii Evraziiskogo ekonomicheskogo soobshchestva’, Byulleten’ mezhdunarodnykh dogovorov, no. 5 (2002), pp. 9–15, 10 October 2000.
Vladimir Putin, ‘Novyi integratsionnyi proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya’, Izvestiya, 5 October 2011, pp. 1, 5, at p. 5.
‘Ne SSSR, no i ne SNG. Nursultan Nazarbaev razoslal proekt formirovaniya Evraziiskogo Soyuza glavam gosudarstv SNG’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 June 1994, pp. 1, 3. Nazarbaev had used the term ‘Euro-Asiatic Union’ in a speech earlier the same month at the London think tank Chatham House (N. A. Nazarbaev, Evraziiskii Soyuz: idei, praktika, perspektivy. 1994–1997 (Moscow: Fond sodeistviya razvitiyu sotsial’nykh i politicheskikh nauk, 1997), p. 26); interviewed some years later, he claimed to have been the first to put forward the idea of a ‘Eurasian Union of States’ (
Nursultan Nazarbaev, ‘Evraziiskii soyuz: ot idei k istorii budush-chego’, Izvestiya, 27 October 2011, p. 5).
Viktor Khamraev, ‘Edinrossy veryat v edinuyu Evraziyu’, Kommersant, 17 November 2011, p. 3.
Putin himself had been associated with this view (see, for instance, Natal’ya Melikova, ‘Prokhody SNG v Erevane. Armeniya ostaetsya edinstvennoi polnost’yu prorossiiskoi stranoi na postsovetskom prostranstve’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 28 March 2005, p. 2).
For early assessments, see Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk, Russia, the European Customs Union and the EU: Cooperation, Stagnation or Rivalry? (London: Chatham House Briefing Paper, August 2012);
Olga Shumylo-Tapiola, The Eurasian Customs Union: Friend or Foe of the EU? (Brussels: Carnegie Europe, October 2012, at http://carnegieendowment.org/fles/customs_union2.pdf, last accessed 30 June 2014); and Evgenii Vinokurov and Aleksandr Libman, ‘Postsovetskii integratsionnyi proryv. Pochemu Tamozhennyi soyuz imeet bol’she shansov, chem ego predshestvenniki’, Rossiya v global’noi politike, vol. 10, no. 2 (March–April 2012), pp. 33–42. There are fuller accounts in G. I. Chufrin, Ocherki evraziiskoi integratsii (Moscow: Ves’ mir, 2013), I. F. Kefeli, Geopolitika Evraziiskogo Soyuza: ot idei k global’nomu proektu (St Petersburg: Geopolitika i bezopasnost’, 2013), and
Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk, eds, Eurasian Economic Integration. Law, Policy and Politics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013). The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development declared the new customs union the ‘first successful example in regional economic integration between countries of the former Soviet Union’ (http://www.ebrd.com/pages/news/press/2012/121107a.shtml, last accessed 27 February 2013).
Yanina Sokolovskaya, ‘Ukrainskie deputaty zadumalis’ o Evraziiskom soyuze’, Izvestiya, 14 November 2011, p. 4.
N. S. Konarev, ed., Zheleznodorozhnyi transport: Entsiklopediya (Moscow: Bol’shaya Rossiiskaya entsiklopediya, 1994), various pages; the early postcommunist years are examined in
J. N. Westwood, Soviet Railways to Russian Railways (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
The early years of Ukrainian foreign policy are considered in Roman Wolczuk, Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); more recent years are examined in
Nathaniel Copsey, Public Opinion and the Making of Foreign Policy in the ‘New Europe’ (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), and
Laure Delcour, Shaping the Post-Soviet Space? EU Policies and Approaches to Region-Building (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
Syuzanna Farizova, ‘Vysokii shtil’ otnoshenii’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 22 April 2010, pp. 1–2; the text of the agreement is in Byulleten’ mezhdunarodnykh dogovorov, no. 10 (2010), pp. 74–75. The wider context is considered in
Elena Kropatcheva, Russia’s Ukraine Policy against the Background of Russian-Western Competition (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).
Ian Traynor and Oksana Grytsenko, ‘Ukraine aligns with Moscow as EU summit fails’, Guardian, 30 November 2013, p. 31.
For the background to these developments, see Brian Bennett, The Last Dictatorship in Europe: Belarus under Lukashenko (London: Hurst, 2011), and
Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last Dictatorship in Europe (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011). On foreign policy see, particularly,
Grigory Ioffe, Understanding Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
Yuras’ Karmanov, ‘Lukashenko vyigral referendum odnako posledstviya etoi pobedy dlya strany ne sovsem yasny’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 May 1995, p. 1.
Aleksandr Starikevich and Besik Urigashvili, ‘Chto dal referendum Belorossii’, Izvestiya, 26 November 1996, p. 2 (about 70 per cent were reported to have voted in favour).
Roi Medvedev, Aleksandr Lukashenko. Kontury belorusskoi modeli (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo VVRG, 2010), pp. 230–231.
Viktor Zozulya, ‘Dreifuet li Minsk na zapad?’, Izvestiya, 14 May 2009, p. 4.
See Grigory Ioffe, ‘Belarus and the West: from estrangement to honeymoon’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics vol. 27 no. 2 (June 2011), pp. 217–240.
See, for instance, Leonid Zaiko, ‘Ot zhelaemogo k deistvitel’nomu’, Rossiya v global’noi politike, vol. 4, no. 1 (January–February 2006), pp. 172–180;
Dmitri Trenin, ‘Russian reborn. Reimagining Russia’s foreign policy’, Foreign Policy, vol. 88, no. 6 (November–December 2009), pp. 64–78.
Elena Korosteleva, ‘Belarusian foreign policy in a time of crisis’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, vol. 27, nos 3–4 (September-December 2011), pp. 566–586, at pp. 571–575. See also
K. Borishpolets and S. Chernyavsky, ‘Rossiisko-belorusskie otnosheniya: ugrozy real’nye i mnimye’, Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, no. 11 (2012), pp. 57–63.
David Marples, ‘Is the Russia-Belarus Union obsolete?’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 55, no. 1 (January-February 2008), pp. 25–35.
Aleksandr Gabuev, Aleksandr Reutov and Movsun Gadzhiev, ‘Belorussii vruchili nedoveritel’nye gramoty’, Kommersant, 1 March 2012, pp. 1, 8 (which includes a short history); the return of the EU ambassadors was mentioned by a junior information minister in Belarus’ segodnya, 28 April 2012, p. 2 (‘Pyat’ sobytii nedeli glazami zamestitelya ministra informatsii Dmitriya Shedko’; there had been no US ambassador since 2008).
A. G. Lukashenka, ‘Poslanie belorusskomu narodu i Natsional’nomu sobraniyu’, 21 April 2011, in Belarus’ segodnya, 22 April 2011, pp. 1–9, at p. 7.
A. G. Lukashenka, ‘Belorusskii put’: patriotizm, intellekt, progress. Poslanie Prezidenta belorussomu narodu i Natsional’nomu sobraniyu’, ibid., 10 May 2012, pp. 3–8, at p. 7.
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White, S., Feklyunina, V. (2014). ‘Europe’ and the Post-Soviet Republics Since 1991. In: Identities and Foreign Policies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453112_3
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