Russia doesn't normally want to start wars. The state's economic and political weakness usually constrains its foreign policy. But on February 21, the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, voted to impeach president Viktor Yanukovych under pressure from the protesters in Maidan Nezalezhnost (Independence Square) and confronted the Kremlin with an existential threat to its own fragile legal order. The wave of uprisings that have transformed political systems in the Middle East suddenly washed up on Russia's own shores. The world around Russia changed dramatically.

Yet recent attempts to assess Putin's ultimate purpose in Ukraine as a form of revanchism regard Russia's behavior as remarkably new. That's because they assign too much significance to the late-February invasion and occupation of Crimea. The invasion was a dramatic, but merely tactical and limited application of military force. In order to understand Putin's long-term foreign-policy strategy, one must look at Russia's response to the Rada's decision to impeach Yanukovych and dramatically overhaul the government, not the invasion of Crimea.

Putin's long-term strategic goal in Ukraine is to protect the Russian state's legal order, not further military expansion. In Putin's conception of Russian statehood, foreign policy is determined by the needs of domestic order. From his 1999 political profession of faith, usually referred to as the "Millennium Message," to the March 18 celebration of the Crimean referendum, Putin has demonstrated a remarkably consistent commitment to the defense of standing legal systems as bulwarks against domestic social and political anarchy. For that reason, any policy responses from North America or Europe should focus on diplomatic engagement. Military containment or confrontation could drag Russia, Europe and North America into a long and costly military and economic confrontation. A destabilized region could also attract Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists to "defend" the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim minority in the newly annexed territory.

Revanchist Russia: Overstating the Strategic Significance of the Annexation of Crimea

The revanchist explanation of the Russian Federation's military incursion into Crimea understandably focuses on the novelty of Russia's use of military force. Russia was really motivated by the allegedly self-evident great-power interests of territorial expansion and increased influence in the domestic politics of other states: the Economist's April 19 cover showed that the insatiable Russian bear had returned, and a May 4 New York Times' editorial argued, "Putin displayed his true colors by invading Crimea and destabilizing eastern Ukraine."

Focusing on the military incursion makes intuitive sense. From the perspective of North American and European governments, Russia's continuing threat to use military force and an aggressive media campaign designed to generate support for its actions seem to be the crisis's most salient features. In the aftermath of CIA and DIA failures to forecast the invasion, Congress has put political pressure to bear on the military incursion. But even proponents of the revanchist consensus note that this operation has too many economic drawbacks in the long run to make the Crimean annexation or any further military incursions viable. Moreover, far from systemically criticizing the international legal order, Putin has justified the incursion in terms of international legal principles. So, what other pressures are part of Putin's calculus of Russia's interests?

Training our eyes on Russia's response to the Rada's potentially illegal decision to impeach President Viktor Yanukovych starts to bring these forces into focus. Justly or not, the Kremlin saw that event as the latest in a series of Western violations of sovereignty and legal norms stretching back to the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999. The appearance of a threat to Russia's sovereignty and constitutional order in a state with complicated historical and cultural ties to Russia threatened to embolden Russia's own political critics. After all, the Duma that was elected in December 2011 and the start of Putin's third term in March 2012 were greeted by public protests that Russia hadn't seen since the 1990s—echoes of the Arab Spring in Eurasia.

Domestic Legal Order: Promoting Russian Statehood since 1999

Putin, himself, has said as much in some underreported lines from his March 18 speech celebrating the Crimean referendum. He criticized NATO's armed interventions in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as well as the "Color Revolutions" and "Arab Spring" that have resulted not in "democracy and freedom" but "chaos, outbreaks in violence and a series of upheavals.” Underlining his criticism, Putin claimed, "the 'Arab Spring' has turned into the 'Arab Winter.'"

Putin's strategic vision for Russia has not changed since the "Millennium Message," but there is evidence that his short-term tactics have, for the time being. Putin's vision is organized around a conservative notion of Russian statehood that assumes significant weaknesses within Russia's society, economy, and, ironically, local government institutions. It's conservative because it regards the state as the sole, legitimate source of slow, legally structured modernization. Traditionally, this conservative vision of Russian statehood has constrained Russia's foreign policy.

As the Obama administration contemplates expanding economic sanctions against Putin's entourage and struggles to understand reports that Russian troops have been pulled away from Ukraine's borders, it should recall Alexis de Tocqueville's famous dictum that "the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually the moment when it begins to reform itself." Putin is not setting a reform agenda, yet. But he is struggling to find new ways to inoculate the Russian state against what he has called the "epidemic of disintegration" in his April 2005 address to the Federal Assembly; hence the violation of the principle of state sovereignty that has guided Russian foreign policy (in Libya and Syria, for example) and flirtations with nationalism.

The April address has become notorious for containing Putin's judgment that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Following Cold War half-truths of totalitarianism, western commentators have taken Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union as evidence of Russia's illegitimate expansionist intentions. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s along ethnic, religious, and economic boundaries showed how tenuously it had held these competing identities together. Much of Putin's political career since 1999 has been consumed with maintaining the integrity of the Russian Federation's federal structure to ensure the peace and prosperity, however imperfect, that has promoted the socio-economic development on which Putin's own popularity is based.

Putin's key policy statements indicate that he is truly motivated by a desire to preserve international legal order, however self-serving this may be. From the "Millennium Message" to his most recent addresses and interviews, Putin has expressed a remarkably consistent message. In his first policy statement, Putin clearly endorsed Russia's "own path of renewal" out of the Russian Federation's "economic backwardness" that "depend[ed] on combining the universal principles of the market economy and democracy with Russian realities." Putin encapsulated this vision of the Russian state with the "Russian Idea": dignified and inclusive patriotism, Russia's status as a great power, recognition of the leading role of the state in Russia's modernization, and social solidarity.

The principles of statehood laid out in the "Millennium Message" can be seen in subsequent statements. In March 2003, for example, Putin condemned the UN resolution allowing the use of military force against Iraq as "the law of the fist" that undermines "the principle of the immutable sovereignty of the state." Presciently, Putin defended the inviolability of state sovereignty as a bulwark against "the area of instability that has arisen [and] will grow and cause negative consequences in other regions of the world." He expressed the same vision in the 2005 "Address to the Federal Assembly" in which he claimed that the "collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" because it released an "epidemic of disintegration that spread to Russia itself" and threatened the very viability of "Russian statehood." Those principles, combined with a savvy media campaign for consumption in the post-Soviet space, informed Russia's overreaction to Georgia's recklessness in the August 2008 five-day war.

Although Putin's invocation of Russia's preternatural spiritual connection with Crimea in his March 18 message may seem mendacious, he linked this concept to a commitment to international legal norms that undergird his conservative vision of Russian statehood. There's little evidence for Putin's claim that "Crimea was always and will remain an inalienable part of Russia in the hearts and consciousness of people." However, he also affirmed his commitment to legally structured relations with Ukraine when he insisted that "good relations with Ukraine are the main thing for us, and they ought not be hostage to dead-end territorial disputes." Putin went on to add that "we have, of course, expected that Ukraine will be our good neighbor, that Russians and Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine, especially in its southeast and in Crimea, will live in the conditions of a friendly, democratic, and civilized state, and that their legal interests will be secured in accord with the norms of international law."

The Social and Economic Sources of the Russian State's Weakness

If these statements are taken seriously, then from the perspective of Russian officialdom, the whole edifice of Russian state and society has been under threat since December 2011. The wave of protests against the Duma elections in December 2011 and Putin's own election in March 2012 revealed the gulf between Russia's government and the rising middle class that Putin's reforms helped to create. (Hence the series of increasingly stringent Internet restrictions enacted piecemeal since November 2013.) Conservatives in government are likely to overreact to any evidence of political disorder, but there is striking evidence that social and economic transformations are threatening the informal social compact that has underwritten Putin's system.