Description
Much attention has been paid to how Russia's patronage over breakaway regions in Eurasia serves as a legitimation tool (benefitting de facto states) and destabilisation mechanism (damaging parent states). This study problematises the existing dominant focus on the clientelistic relationship between patron and de facto states and emphasises the role of parent states’ economic strategies in changing the political calculus for patron and de facto states. How do parent states’ economic policies affect the pace and nature of Russia’s patronage over post-Soviet de facto states? Using process tracing, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews, this article examines the (timing of the) steps taken by Russia to prop up the self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) (or Transnistria) and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR/LNR) – through social assistance, energy subsidies and cryptoassets – and gradually integrate them into its federal economic and financial system between 2014 and 2022. While highlighting important differences between the two cases, this study finds that Ukraine and Moldova’s counter-secessionist policies such as economic blockades, predicated on the assumption that trade restrictions and financial operational constraints would quell separatist aspirations, restore sovereignty and facilitate reintegration, have backfired. Moscow and de facto leaders exploited the breakaway regions’ resulting isolation to mobilise local grievances and, ultimately, justify and advance systematic integration with the Russian Federation as a mechanism of subversion. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exacerbated existing differences, with Russia plundering and fully absorbing the already deeply isolated DNR/LNR and the PMR further reorienting towards the EU’s market out of necessity while continuing to brandish the rhetoric of Eurasian integration.
