Putin loosens rules for troop deployments

In 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, Moscow called it "fraternal assistance". It needed little more than force, a compliant Warsaw Pact and 200,000 uninvited troops.

Putin's Russia prefers a legal instrument first. On May 25, he signed amendments to two federal laws giving himself unilateral authority to send Russian armed forces abroad when Russian citizens face "arrest, detention, or criminal prosecution" by courts Moscow does not recognise. The Duma (the lower house of parliament) passed it 381-0. The Federation Council (the upper house) approved it unanimously (Kyiv Independent, Meduza). The law came into force within days.

The mechanism is not new. Russia has tested versions of it in Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and eastern Ukraine in 2022. The sequence is simple: issue passports, claim Russians are under threat, then reserve the right to intervene.

The Passport-to-Intervention Pipeline

The military law only works because it sits beside another tool: the mass distribution of Russian citizenship to people Moscow later says it must "protect". Nine days before signing the deployment law, Putin signed a separate decree scrapping standard citizenship requirements for residents of Transnistria, the Russian-backed separatist territory in Moldova. No residency requirement, no language exam, no history test (Meduza). The Lansing Institute described it as "a coherent hybrid-warfare mechanism" that "directly complements" the deployment law (Lansing Institute).

Until now, Russian law required Federation Council approval for each overseas deployment. Putin worked around that in Crimea, while still observing the form. The new law removes the requirement entirely for "citizen protection" operations. In those cases, deployment becomes a presidential decision (United24 Media).

The wording is aimed at courts "in which Russia does not participate". That catches both the International Criminal Court and the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression. Thirty-four Council of Europe states signed that tribunal into existence in Chișinău on May 15, ten days before Putin signed the military law (Euronews).

Two Europes, Two Risk Assessments

Europe is not reading the move in one voice. Estonia summoned Russia's chargé d'affaires on May 21, expelled a military reservist and restricted diplomats' movement (Estonian MFA). It is also legislating to ban property purchases by Russian nationals (ERR). Finland said it will reject non-biometric Russian passports from June 1 and has committed to NATO's 5% GDP defence spending target (Yle). The European Parliament declared that "threatening the Baltic states means threatening the entire European Union" (European Parliament).

The sharpest change is in Hungary. Péter Magyar's new Tisza government has broken with the old pattern. After expelling SVR officer Artur Szuskov on May 4, a move Viktor Orbán's government had blocked, Budapest signalled it was ready to support EU sanctions on figures Orbán had personally protected, including Patriarch Kirill (Euronews Hungary). Russia lost an EU veto proxy and a piece of its intelligence infrastructure in Budapest at the same time.

Slovakia is the outlier. Robert Fico's government said nothing about the law, while restoring Russian diplomatic and military attaché presence that previous governments had expelled (Denník N). The European Parliament answered with a 347-165 vote threatening to activate the conditionality mechanism, the EU tool that can freeze funds to governments undermining the rule of law. That could put billions at risk (Aktuality.sk).

The NATO Gap

Czech President Petr Pavel put his finger on the problem: Russia has "developed a style of behaviour that almost reaches the threshold for Article 5, but always stays slightly below" (Novinky.cz). A small "citizen protection" operation, presented as humanitarian and wrapped in deniability, is built to sit in that grey zone.

NATO's 2016 Warsaw Summit doctrine allows hybrid attacks to trigger collective defence under Article 5. In practice, the Alliance has treated even physical airspace violations as Article 4 consultation matters rather than collective defence triggers.

No NATO institution has yet produced a specific answer to this pipeline. The Commission is preparing a 21st sanctions package. NATO's Eastern Sentry links air defences along the eastern flank. But the central question remains formally unanswered: when does the distribution of passports to a foreign population become preparation for aggression?

With roughly 78,000 Russian citizens in Estonia and 40,000 in Latvia (Kyiv Independent), this is not a theoretical exercise. Russia passed the laws in public, over twelve weeks, without a single opposing vote. Europe's response is still being built.