The Novorossiya Project
Journal: Oxford University Press eBooks
Year: 2017

In breaking apart a sovereign territorial state, it is helpful, if not always necessary, to have an alternative geopolitical imaginary at the ready and for this ersatz replacement to have some degree of local credibility and support. When Putin decided to annex Crimea, the move was intuitively presented as a historic Russian territory rejoining the motherland and, further, as the correction of an arbitrary and capricious historical wrong. The demographics of Crimea were such that this storyline