TARTU – Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow has insisted that ethnic Russians and even members of other Russian-speaking nationalities living outside the Russian Federation in the former Soviet republics and Baltic states are, regardless of their citizenship, its „compatriots” and thus deserving of Moscow’s special protection.

That stance - which has no basis in international law - not only has encouraged some in the Russian Federation and abroad to look to a future in which a larger Moscow-centered state might be recreated but also has contributed to the ethnicization of politics in many of these countries and limiting the ability of the new states to consolidate their societies.

Now, the Russian government has taken an additional step in this area that sets a potentially dangerous precedent: It has granted Russian citizenship to a former senior official of the Ukrainian government and thus placed him beyond the immediate reach of Kyiv which wants to bring him to trial on a variety of charges.

Last week, Russian officials both in Kyiv and in Moscow confirmed that Igor’ Bakai, the head of the presidential administration under former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, had been granted Russian citizenship and thus enjoyed Moscow’s protection.

Russia’s ambassador in Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, told a press conference that Bakai is now a Russian citizen, pointedly adding that „we defend our citizens. So you can rest easy about Bakai.” And Ukrainian prosecutors announced that Moscow officials had told them that „in correspondence with the laws of the Russian Federation, Russia will never hand him back” for trial.

Ukrainian prosecutors have been seeking to bring Bakai to trial for malfeasance in office, and as early as May, they appealed to the CIS Bureau for Struggle Against Organized Crime and the Russian Interior Ministry to return Bakai to Ukraine to stand trial. But Russian officials have refused to do so and now cite the 1993 Russian law on citizenship.

Not surprisingly, senior officials in the Ukrainian capital are now outraged, with State Secretary Aleksandr Zinchenko saying that „those who provided dual citizenship to the former leader of the State Administration of Affairs of Ukraine Igor’ Bakai must bear juridical responsibility for their actions.”

The resolution of this case almost certainly hinges less on the laws cited by officials in the two capitals than on a political decision by the Kremlin, especially since at least some in the Russian capital may hope to use this case to gain access to Ukrainian officials in whom Moscow prosecutors are interested.

But however that may be and regardless of how the Bakai matter in fact works out, the consequences of Moscow’s high-profile action are likely to prove to be dangerously explosive in many parts of the post-Soviet space.

First, by intervening in this way, the Russian government intentionally or not has provided grist for the mill of those non-Russians who believe that they cannot trust ethnic Russians or members of Russian-speaking minorities to occupy positions of responsibility in their societies.

Such feelings have been fading in many places with overwhelming majorities of the citizens of the former Soviet republics and Baltic states having come to view the even larger percentage of Russians with citizenship in their countries as completely loyal and worthy of trust.

Moscow’s actions in the Bakai case, however, undermine that trend and will only exacerbate interethnic tensions once again. Indeed, in some cases, non-Russian governments may be under renewed pressure from their titular nationalities to view Russians as disloyal, thus restarting a vicious circle in which the Russian government is likely to respond harshly.

Second, by granting citizenship to Bakai in this way, the Russian government will also encourage those Russian nationalists within the Russian Federation and beyond its borders to continue to press for a revision of the collapse of the USSR in 1991, a trend that will help power precisely the extremist groups in Russian society the Kremlin insists it opposes.

Not surprisingly, Russian nationalist publications and websites have provided the most extensive coverage of the Bakai case, presenting it as an indication of Moscow’s intentions to protect Russians abroad, something that has been a key demand of the Russian right and one that will only be energized by what Moscow has done in this case.

And third, by taking this step, Moscow has called attention to both its use of economic pressure in the former Soviet republics and Baltic states and its willingness to co-operate with and even actively support those who violate the laws of these countries, regardless of what that says about the commitment of the Russian authorities to the rule of law.

On the one hand, as one Russian commentator suggested, Moscow has a very real interest in Bakai as „a valuable source of information about Ukrainian property” and thus is willing to ignore demands that the former Ukrainian official be sent back to Kyiv to face criminal charges.

And on the other, as several Russian news reports pointed out, Bakai now travels about with exactly the same kind of private security protection common to so many Russian "biznesmeny" – itself hardly an advertisement for the Russian Federation as a state which now seeks to advertise itself as interested in good governance.

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