Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The book provides a detailed assessment of Russia’s state practice in the post-Soviet space with the aim to ascertain a distinct Russian approach to the right of peoples to self-determination, illustrated by seven case studies on the secessionist conflicts over Abkhazia, Chechnya, Crimea, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Tatarstan, and Transnistria. As such, it may serve as a detailed documentation of the raw material necessary to form and identify rules of customary international law, produced by one particular state. Beyond that, it seeks to test the accuracy of and give substance to Lauri Mälksoo’s general assessment in Russian Approaches to International Law that the ‘evolution of Moscow’s legal argumentation and views in these complex cases … has not followed some overarching legal principle but reflected changing power politics. Until 2014, Russia claimed that sovereignty trumped self-determination but in 2014 partly destroyed its own earlier argumentation by its own actions in Ukraine.’ Finally, this book is a contribution to what Mälksoo calls the ‘debatable nexus’ between legal scholarship and state practice of international law in Russia, that is the open question of to what extent international law as an academic discipline continues to be subjugated to the raison d’état in Russia.