Der Bolotnaja-Prozess (russisch "Bolotnoe Delo") wurde gegen Teilnehmer und Organisatoren einer Großdemonstration in Moskau am 6. Mai 2012 geführt. Die Demonstration war Teil der Proteste gegen Fälschungen bei der Parlamentswahl im Dezember 2011 und der Präsidentschaftswahl im März 2012. Aus Gründen der Übersichtlichkeit widmet sich dieser Text vorrangig dem Prozess am Moskauer Zamoskvoreč'e-Bezirksgericht, der von Juni 2013 bis Februar 2014 unter Leitung von Richterin Natal'ja Nikišina abgehalten wurde. Von allen Prozessen wurde ihm die größte Aufmerksamkeit zuteil, da hier die Fälle von zunächst zwölf, später acht Angeklagten gleichzeitig verhandelt wurden ("Prozess der Acht"). Der Prozess kann als exemplarisch gelten, weil hier alle Merkmale zusammenkommen, die den gesamten Bolotnaja-Fall kennzeichnen: Die Dominanz der Anklage bei Ermittlung und Beweisführung, hohe Freiheitsstrafen ohne Bewährung für relativ geringe Vergehen (selbst nach Aussage der Geschädigten), eine relativ hohe Zahl von bis dato unauffälligen Protestneulingen unter den Angeklagten, und die Missachtung nahezu sämtlicher Anträge der Verteidigung zum Ablauf des Prozesses, den Haftbedingungen der Angeklagten und den Gründen für die Anordnung von Untersuchungshaft.
Russia has become a very different country since it annexed Crimea three years ago. By breaching international law, its relations with the West are now fraught with tension, even in areas where there was once hope of cooperation. In a bid to reduce its dependence on Europe, Russia has touted its pivot to Asia and its Eurasian Economic Union, but those wheels have been slow to turn. Inside the country, three years of economic stagnation have followed that historic takeover of 2014. Sanctions are biting, and so are low global oil prices. Within the government bureaucracy itself, power struggles are underway: new ideologies and new faces are jostling for prominence. The aim of this book is to provide an analysis of these trends providing a road map for anyone seeking to understand the workings of "post-Crimean" Russia. It includes studies of Russia-West relations, the role of sanctions, Western policy towards Ukraine, anti-Americanism, Russia's military doctrine, the fate of its army's modernization plans, migration, the increasing "weaponization" of history, and the government's attempts to build a new "Crimean consensus" with Russian society, a reworked social contract emphasizing traditional values and a vastly different understanding of human rights to that in the West.
Russland hat bisher knapp 200 000 russische Pässe an Ukrainerinnen und Ukrainer aus den "Volksrepubliken" Donezk und Luhansk vergeben. Damit untergräbt es den Minsker Friedensprozess. Die Passportisierung des Donbas ist Teil eines erprobten außenpolitischen Instrumentariums. Mit ihm erschwert Russland gezielt die Beilegung ungelöster Territorialkonflikte im postsowjetischen Raum mittels kontrollierter Instabilität. Durch diesen demonstrativen Eingriff in die staatliche Souveränität übt Russland Druck auf die ukrainische Zentralregierung in Kyjiw aus. Innenpolitisch verfolgt Russland das Ziel, durch Zuwanderung dem natürlichen Bevölkerungsschwund im eigenen Land entgegenzuwirken. Wegen des Krieges in der Ostukraine migrierten immer mehr Ukrainerinnen und Ukrainer nach Russland; dies war einer der Gründe für die Neufassung der russischen Migrationsstrategie im Jahr 2018. Die Liberalisierung der Gesetzgebung über Staatsangehörigkeit zielt insbesondere auf die Ukraine ab. Indem Russland die Lösung des Konflikts verschleppt, erreicht es zwei Ziele auf einmal: Erstens behält Moskau über den Donbas dauerhaft Einfluss auf die Ukraine, zweitens wird Russland für viele Ukrainerinnen und Ukrainer als Einwanderungsland attraktiver. (Autorenreferat)
Russia has so far issued almost 200,000 Russian passports to Ukrainians from the "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk. This undermines the Minsk peace process. The passportisation of the Donbas is part of a tried and tested set of foreign policy instruments. Russia is deliberately making it more difficult to resolve territorial conflicts in the post-Soviet space by creating controlled instability. This demonstrative intervention in state sovereignty exerts pressure on the Ukrainian central government in Kyiv. Domestically, Russia's goal is to counteract its own natural population decline through immigration. Because of the war in eastern Ukraine, more and more Ukrainians have migrated to Russia; this was one of the reasons behind Russia revising its migration strategy in 2018. The liberalisation of citizenship legislation was aimed particularly at Ukraine. By delaying any resolution to the conflict, Russia achieves two objectives simultaneously: it retains permanent influence on Ukraine via the Donbas, and it becomes more attractive to many Ukrainians as a destination for emigration. (author's abstract)
Die Zustimmungswerte des russischen Staatspräsidenten Wladimir Putin und der Regierungspartei Einiges Russland befinden sich auf einem historischen Tiefstand. Die Hauptstadt Moskau erlebte im Juli und August im Vorfeld der Regionalwahlen vom 8. September die größten Demonstrationen seit der Protestwelle 2011–2013. Doch die Stabilität des Regimes ist vorerst nicht in Gefahr, von einer Legitimationskrise lässt sich noch nicht sprechen. Dem Kreml steht weiterhin ein breites Spektrum an Mitteln zur Verfügung, um dem wachsenden Verlangen von Teilen der Gesellschaft nach politischer Repräsentation entgegenzuwirken. Hierzu gehören Wahlmanipulation und Formen selektiver Repression. An Deutschland gerichtete Vorwürfe, sich in Russlands innere Angelegenheiten einzumischen, sollen von hausgemachten Problemen ablenken. In den nächsten Jahren dürften sich die Spannungen verschärfen, die aus dem Gegensatz zwischen Forderungen nach Grundrechten und Mitbestimmung von unten und repressiver Reaktion von oben resultieren. (Autorenreferat)
Fifteen Russian regions and annexed Sevastopol elected new governors on 10 September 2017. The process reveals the Kremlin's response to rising socioeconomic tensions in Russia's regions: changing their leaders. A string of older regional bosses rooted within their local elites have been forced to make way for a younger generation of political managers over whom Moscow holds greater sway. The regions' financial independence has been curtailed again too. For the Kremlin, this round of voting represented the final test before the presidential election scheduled for 18 March 2018 - and it passed off largely successfully. But the next presidential term will also see growing uncertainty over Vladimir Putin's successor in the Kremlin. These latest centralisation moves are designed to counter potential political risks ahead of time. But they weaken the incentives for governors to invest in the long-term development of their regions. (author's abstract)
Am 10. September 2017 wurden in 15 russischen Regionen und im annektierten Sewastopol neue Gouverneure gewählt. Die Wahlen haben gezeigt, dass der Kreml der gestiegenen sozioökonomischen Anspannung in den Regionen mit neuem Führungspersonal begegnen will. Immer mehr ältere, in der regionalen Elite verwurzelte Landesfürsten müssen besser kontrollierbaren jüngeren Polit-Managern aus Moskau weichen. Auch die finanzielle Unabhängigkeit der Regionen wurde weiter eingeschränkt. Für den Kreml verlief der letzte Test vor den Präsidentschaftswahlen, die für den 18. März 2018 angesetzt sind, überwiegend erfolgreich. Mit Putin wird 2018 aber auch die Unsicherheit über seine Nachfolge in den Kreml einziehen. Die Zentralisierung soll möglichen politischen Risiken schon im Vorfeld entgegenwirken. Sie schwächt jedoch die Anreize für die Gouverneure, in die langfristige Entwicklung der Regionen zu investieren. (Autorenreferat)
Referring in this paper to the extraterritorial naturalization of Donbas residents en masse, passportization is one of Russia's preeminent foreign policy tools to deepen the potentially explosive deadlock in the implementation of the Minsk Agreements. In this deadlock, passportization can serve as a tool of ambiguous Russian extraterritorial governance over the Donbas while keeping violence at a comparatively low level, or as a tool to justify a full-scale Russian military intervention to "protect" its citizens from, for example, a purported "genocide." Russia does not necessarily want more citizens or territories: Russia's ultimate goals are far-ranging security guarantees to prevent Ukraine's further integration or membership with NATO. Passportization is one of the instruments to achieve this overarching goal. Passportization of residents of the non-government-controlled areas of the Donbas does not endow these Ukrainians with full membership of the Russian state; they are "second-class citizens" with diminished rights. This becomes especially apparent with regard to not only international non-recognition, but also pensions, social benefits, and voting rights. Due to this "diminished citizenship," Russia suffers from a legitimacy deficit in the self-proclaimed "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk - the "DPR" and "LPR." Enforcing voting rights for Donbas residents in the 2021 Duma elections therefore served the purpose of legitimizing Russia in the residents' eyes: It suggested that integration with Russia is continuously advancing. In the 2021 Russian Duma (parliamentary) elections, the turnout among eligible passportized Donbas residents was above 40 percent. Of the roughly 200,000 voters, three quarters voted electronically at de facto polling stations (so-called "information centers") on the territory of the "DPR" and "LPR"; one quarter travelled to polling stations in the neighboring Rostov region in Russia. With the whole adult population of the "DPR" and "LPR" as a reference point, less than 10 percent of Donbas residents took part in the Duma elections. Donbas voters are pro-Russian: They have much more favorable views toward United Russia than Russians in the Rostov region. On average, the presence of Donbas residents at respective Rostov polling stations, and at the seven Rostov electoral districts, adds 25 percent to the United Russia result. This is paradoxical, as United Russia follows the official Russian reading of the Minsk Agreements - reintegration of the Donbas with Ukraine on Russian terms - while Donbas residents voted for integration with Russia. But the official results give a distorted picture of support for United Russia, as workplace mobilization and electoral manipulations were widely reported. Ukraine's policy to counteract passportization and the involvement of Ukrainian citizens in Russian elections has a legal foundation: Ukraine does not allow dual citizenship. The fast-track passports are not recognized, and passportized Donbas residents are still considered Ukrainian - and not Russian - citizens. Russian elections with the involvement of Donbas residents are declared illegal and the Russian parliament illegitimate. But beyond this legal foundation, Ukraine lacks a coherent, long-term strategy on how to reintegrate Ukrainians in the "DPR" and "LPR." The reaction of the United States and the EU to Russia's passportization has been weak; a mere non-recognition of these passports is not sufficient. Instead, the West should acknowledge that passportization and the development of Russian electoral infrastructure in the Donbas fundamentally erodes the political part of the Minsk Agreements by undermining the possibility of having free and fair local elections according to OSCE standards. The U.S. and the EU should reinvigorate their support of Ukrainian sovereignty without pushing Ukraine deeper into the "sequency trap" with political concessions. Ukraine urgently needs a coherent long-term policy toward its citizens in the non-government-controlled territories. Policy suggestions from various actors range from hawkish (stripping Donbas residents with Russian passports of Ukrainian citizenship) to conciliatory (de facto recognition of some documents issued by the "DPR" and "LPR"). This hodgepodge of proposed policy responses unmistakably sends the wrong signals to Donbas residents. Instead, Ukraine should deepen its engagement with Donbas residents by making public services more accessible, including by a speedy digital transformation of state services. Better Ukrainian public services would be a powerful tool to counteract Russia's creeping passportization of the Donbas.
This Policy Paper outlines four possible scenarios for the future of the political system in Belarus by the end of 2022. The scenarios are based on two key drivers that are crucial for political developments in Belarus: the level of social mobilization and democratic transition. The Policy Paper creates a framework for alternative thinking and outlines important insights, opportunities, and risks. It also formulates desirable normative options for political developments in Belarus in the upcoming twelve months and gives policy recommendations on how to make them possible.
