The Kremlin’s manufactured duty to protect

In September 2026, Russia included occupied Ukrainian territory in elections to its State Duma. Voting covered Crimea and occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. On 21 September, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom jointly condemned the process and rejected its capacity to change those territories’ status. Global Affairs Canada, Joint statement on Russia’s sham elections in Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories (21 September 2026)unverified record

A parliamentary election does something different from an annexation referendum. It treats membership of the state as already settled: residents are asked to participate in Russian government within a framework that presumes Russian sovereignty. The occupation supplies the institutions through which that presumption acquires the appearance of ordinary political life.

The most revealing feature of Russia’s territorial expansion is the way Moscow helps produce the circumstances it later invokes as reasons to intervene. A population receives Russian passports, a separatist authority acquires Russian support, or an occupied territory holds a Russian-organised referendum. The resulting situation is then presented as something Russia has a duty to respect or defend.

This reverses the apparent direction of responsibility. Moscow presents itself as responding to a political reality that its own actions have helped create.

Who becomes Russia’s responsibility?

The argument begins with a connection: a territory once belonged to a Russian state, its inhabitants speak Russian, or some of them identify as Russian. Each can be made to support a claim that Moscow has a special role there.

But these propositions describe different things. Language is not citizenship. Ancestry is not political allegiance. Previous imperial rule does not establish what the people living in a territory want today. Moving between these categories allows an argument about cultural affinity to become an assertion of political authority without demonstrating why one should follow from the other.

Passportisation makes that shift concrete. Russia can grant citizenship to people beyond its internationally recognised borders and subsequently invoke their status as Russian citizens in its case for intervention. The EU-commissioned inquiry into the 2008 Georgia war criticised pre-war Russian passport distribution in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and dismissed allegations of genocide. Nathan Hodge, Report: Georgia Triggered War; Russia Ain't Clean, Either, WIRED (30 September 2009)unverified record

The circularity is the important point. The presence of Russian citizens is presented as an external circumstance demanding a Russian response, although Russian policy helped establish that circumstance.

This does not mean that the inhabitants are invented, that their identities are insincere, or that their grievances are necessarily fictitious. What Moscow can manufacture is the political relationship through which it claims authority over their future.

A related development in 2026 extends the protection argument into disputes over judicial authority. Law No. 149-FZ, signed on 25 May and effective from 5 June, provides for armed protection of Russian citizens facing detention or proceedings abroad before specified foreign or international judicial bodies whose jurisdiction Russia does not recognise through the treaty or UN Security Council grounds set out in the law. This concerns citizens facing legal proceedings, rather than a general category of Russian speakers. A June legal analysis interprets it as a threat against enforcement of international criminal accountability. It is not evidence of a particular annexation plan, but it further embeds the link between citizenship and extraterritorial military action in Russian domestic law. A Russian Human Rights Lawyer, Threatening the Use of Force?, Völkerrechtsblog (29 June 2026)unverified record

A crisis becomes an invitation

Separatist institutions can perform a similar function. Once a local authority depends on Russian backing, its request for Russian protection cannot simply be treated as independent evidence that intervention is necessary. The support and the invitation belong to the same causal chain.

The histories nevertheless resist a universal script. The Georgia inquiry identified the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali as the trigger for large-scale war while also finding that Russia had fuelled tensions. Local agency matters; a recurring mechanism does not make every conflict a Russian fabrication. Nathan Hodge, Report: Georgia Triggered War; Russia Ain't Clean, Either, WIRED (30 September 2009)unverified record

Nor does political preparation make military power secondary. As a NATO Defense College analysis stresses, Russia secured Crimea militarily in 2014, despite the political conditions that facilitated its operation. Nicolò Fasola, How Russia fights, NATO Defense College (28 June 2022)unverified record

The referendum that followed illustrates another reversal. Russia established control, then invoked a political process conducted under that control to justify annexation. The UN General Assembly’s Resolution 68/262 declared that the vote had no validity and could not provide a basis for changing Crimea’s status. UN General Assembly, Territorial Integrity of Ukraine : resolution / adopted by the General Assembly (1 April 2014)unverified record

The analytical problem is therefore more than whether a particular vote was credible. The power seeking legitimacy had already imposed the conditions in which that legitimacy was supposedly expressed.

Protection that reproduces its own justification

These instruments need not appear in a fixed order. Citizenship can prepare a claim to protection before military intervention; it can also consolidate an occupation afterwards.

On 20 March 2026, UN human rights monitors reported that Russian policies in occupied Ukraine required residents to acquire Russian citizenship and comply with Russian institutions. They documented coercive conditions that forced people from their homes and obstructed their return, including property confiscation and restrictions on entry. UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Russia’s discriminatory policies in occupied parts of Ukraine displaced thousands and impedes returns – UN Human Rights monitors (20 March 2026)unverified record

Under such conditions, the resulting citizenship pattern cannot be read as an unforced expression of allegiance. Accepting a passport to retain access to a home or a livelihood does not establish consent to annexation. Displacement also changes who remains available to participate in the political processes organised by the occupying power.

September’s parliamentary vote adds an institutional layer to this transformation. The five governments’ joint statement explicitly connected the elections to the imposition of Russian administration, law, education, language and citizenship. These measures should be understood together: occupation changes the conditions of political participation, then participation within those conditions can be presented as evidence of belonging. The election itself cannot resolve that circularity. Global Affairs Canada, Joint statement on Russia’s sham elections in Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories (21 September 2026)unverified record

Formal annexation is one possible outcome. Dependence on Russian protection can also give Moscow durable influence without incorporation. The central mechanism is the same: intervention creates relationships and institutions that can subsequently be invoked to justify its continuation.

When the Kremlin says it must protect a population, defend a local authority or honour a territorial choice, the necessary question is how that situation came into being. The longer an occupation lasts, the more documents, institutions and political rituals it produces. Treating those accumulated facts as independent evidence of belonging rewards the process that manufactured them. The consequences of intervention become its retrospective justification.