Authors

Discussion

Abstract:

The Russian legislature has played a more significant role in legitimizing Russia’s war against Ukraine than hitherto known. In legislative terms, it has resuscitated practices of Soviet nationality policies by legislating “peoples’ republics” in Ukraine. This does not only imply a return to re-colonialization, and justification of an autocratic regime’s military subjugation of a nascent nation-building democracy. The core argument is an often-overlooked component in the conflict—the patched-up legal underpinning of setting up “territories” that are understood as native “Russian” lands, but also as territories where a minority seeks protection from some alleged violation of their linguistic and cultural rights. The paper engages with Brubaker’s suggestions that nationalism is a driver in the reorganization of political space in war-torn Ukraine, but also that the processes engendering this form of rupturing nationalism is unique and Soviet style. The core argument is that the war against Ukraine is the residual of a nationality policy, where national minorities could be construed, and thereafter protected by reinventing political space and law.