Old Wine in New Bottles: Latvia 1940 Compared with Crimea 2014

In late February, 2014, strange bands of armed gunmen, with no signs of a distinctive emblem belonging to any army, started to appear on the roads and streets of the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine. Later these 'little green men' began to seize government buildings in Crimea. Shortly afterwards, on 16 March 2014, the people of Crimea participated in an illegal referendum and voted overwhelmingly for their region to become a part of Russia. This vote was illegitimate, firstly as it was held under hostile Russian military occupation with no international monitoring and many reports of intimidation, secondly it was pushed through with only a couple of weeks' warning, and thirdly it was illegal under Ukrainian law. However, legitimate or not, Crimea effectively became part of Russia thereafter. Was the Russian hybrid war1 against Ukraine a novelty? No, a similar scenario had already taken place in Latvia in 1940. Soldiers without any signs of belonging to a particular army attacked the Latvian border checkpoint of Maslenki in the early morning of 15 June 1940. The scenario resembled that in Crimea 74 years later: a silent occupation of Latvia, a new pro-Moscow government, illegal elections to the parliament and an illegal referendum. After all these events the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia 'voluntarily' joined the Soviet Union on 5 August 1940. This means that Russia has re-used the same method of hybrid war against neighbouring countries for extending its territory: in practice, the cases of Latvia in 1940 and Crimea in 2014 are very similar. This chapter will be devoted to a legal analysis of both cases. Until now, the case of Latvia in 1940 has been excluded from European legal history from the point of view of specific hybrid war.