Russia’s Patronage Over Post-Soviet De Facto States: Protecting Compatriots or Geopolitical Interest in Transnistria?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most de facto states have patrons. In Eurasia, Russia serves as such to Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria, as it did to Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. What motivates patronal politics? While constructivists look for answers by studying Russia’s identity, representations and ‘compatriot’ policies and discourse, realists infer Russia’s motives looking at Moscow’s geopolitical interests. As a result, there is no unambiguous answer: is it about moral obligation to protect the brethren or about securing national interests? This article tests it empirically by analysing Russia’s patronage over Transnistria between 2001 and 2009. It investigates the issue of Transnistrian external trade, which Moldova attempted to take control of – something that Transnistria considered as threatening its very survival. The analysis undermines claims about moral motivation as a driver of Russian patronage of de facto states, at least in Transnistria. Russia is clearly reacting to geopolitical changing game rather than to the compatriots’ cry for help.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it