Russia, the Responsibility to Protect and Intervention

It is important to note at the outset that Russia fails to distinguish between the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) and humanitarian intervention. Therefore, despite the fact that the RtoP doctrine itself stipulates that the principle should not be viewed as identical to humanitarian intervention, even in the Western scholarly literature there appears to be some disagreement on whether this is in fact the case. Russia persists in conflating the two principles. This chapter will examine the possible reasons for this conflation by providing the historical and analytical context of Russian thinking on intervention since the fall of the Soviet Union. It will be demonstrated that the roots of this thinking need to be traced back to the interventions in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the resistance to US hegemony, at both regional and global levels, and what Russia sees as attempts to overturn existing norms, rather than simply focusing on more recent events such as the “Arab Spring” in isolation. Furthermore, the issue of intervention has become increasingly intertwined with domestic developments. This chapter will examine Russia’s views on sovereignty and intervention in the post-Cold War era in general, before looking at Russia’s stance on the interventions of the 1990s and the watershed case of Kosovo. Then, with the advent of the RtoP Doctrine in 2001, other relevant cases of intervention as well as nonintervention will be examined in order to give some idea of when Russia supports intervention and when it does not. This chapter also focuses on Russian understandings of the RtoP doctrine.