Fake news, Refugees and Russian Federation’s Strategy in the Black Sea Region

Abstract

"Judging from the Russian Federation’s current behavior, its attachment to the Eurasian identity stressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski 25 years ago is still very important. Equally important is projecting its influence to the Eastern NATO Flank to revive its dominance in Europe. For that to happen, logically, the democratic cohesion of the European Union and the dominance of the Euro-Atlantic Military Alliance have to be weakened. This paper aims to analyse the two most recent crises in which the Russian Federation is directly involved and its strategy for dominance – the Ukrainian crisis and the Belarus-EU border crisis. The methods employed by the Russian Federation – fake news and weaponising migration – are representative for the complex insecurity landscape that the democratic countries have to counterbalance. Analysing the degree to which these novel methods of aggression advanced Russian Federation’s interests in the Black Sea would be the central point of the paper. To conduct such an analysis, qualitative methods were predominately used, such as content analysis of primary (official declarations and security briefs) and secondary sources (articles written and opinions expressed in mainstream media regarding the security crises).The conclusion does not aim to be a final one, but rather place the most recent events into the broader perspective of the new security landscape, dominated by complex threats and insecurity sources."