Conflict freezing of the Russian Federation as a security policy tool: Cases of Georgia and Ukraine

In this thesis, in which the security policy of the RF is discussed, the Kremlin's strategy of freezing conflicts through Georgia and Ukraine interventions is focused. It is seen that the RF, which went into an economic and political crisis after the collapse of the USSR, developed a Near Abroad Policy that pointed to its "special interests" in the former Soviet space with the Foreign Policy Concept announced in April 1993. From this point of view, in this study, it is argued that RF's foreign and security policy is in a consistency that prioritizes the Near Abroad, in opposition to the understanding that is frequently encountered in the literature and defined RF foreign policy as Atlanticist until 1993. The Atlanticist definition of RF foreign policy stems from the fact that, in addition to the economic and political crises, the war in Chechnya prevented RF from implementing its Near Abroad Policy. For this reason, in the first part of the study, the economic and political transformation of the RF is discussed. The second part, which deals with the security policy of the RF, reveals that the RF was exposed to the (re)containment policy by the USA with the logic of the Cold War, through the movements called "color revolution" in the former Soviet space and the enlargement policy of NATO. The basis of RF's security policy against this containment is to freeze the conflicts in the Near Abroad. In this context, RF's 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine interventions are discussed in the third and fourth chapters as the case studies of the thesis.