Russia’s Patronage Over Post-Soviet De Facto States: Protecting Compatriots or Geopolitical Interest in Transnistria?
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".