Kaur,
That's part of the problem in de-centering an imperial power: where are the legitimate boundaries? Which norms make those boundaries legitimate? The Westphalian nation-state model provides some answers, but that's a different paradigm than the one under which the Russian state operates. The historical references of Moscow are not the same as those of Washington, London, etc. In the Russian experience, boundaries (and nationalities) are mobile, and state systems are less defined by their geographic scope than their political reach through networks of patronage. During the Yeltsin years, the Russian elite attempted to make this transformation from an imperial power to a Westphalian one, but that project ended in failure.
EDIT: There is not a differentiation between internal and external in an imperial system, or a recognition of subordinate but equal political units. The Westphalian model emphasizes the creation of nation-states, but Russia has historically been a single state with multiple nations. Whatever political structures were granted to these nations were subordinated to the centralized power in St. Petersburg and/or Moscow. So what the dismantling of the USSR did was create numerous issues about the territorial integrity and sovereignty of of new political units created for nations that were not, on the whole, independent historically. So what are the geographical limits of centralization? There are none because imperial power is not defined by geography. We use the Westphalian typology that makes clear demarcations between internal and external to describe the construction of states, which makes it difficult to describe the importance of the term 'Near Abroad' in the Russian foreign policy lexicon. Essentially, from Moscow's perspective, there is no difference between Ukraine and any of Russia's 22 republics.
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