President Medvedev is flexing his military muscle by seeking new powers to send Russian troops on missions abroad. The upper house of parliament has reviewed legislation that will give him the right to deploy the Army outside Russia to defend a friendly state, fight piracy at sea and protect commercial shipping.

All pretty uncontroversial. Except that there is also a provision that empowers Mr Medvedev to order a military intervention to defend Russian citizens from armed attack. This has unnerved the governments of several former Soviet republics with large ethnic Russian populations.

Mr Medvedev submitted the Bill to the parliament in August, on the first anniversary of the war with Georgia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. The Kremlin justified its invasion and occupation of parts of Georgia by stating that it was protecting Russian citizens — having first created a citizen population by handing out passports to South Ossetian separatists over the preceding decade.

Something similar is now going on in Crimea, the Ukrainian region with a large pro-Moscow population that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The fleet must leave Ukraine by 2017 but most Russians regard Crimea as historically their territory and the Kremlin has little intention of going. Ukraine’s secret service has already accused Russian diplomats of stirring trouble by funding nationalist groups in Crimea which could be relied upon to “appeal” to Moscow to protect them.

The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all Nato members, also have large Russian minorities, a legacy from the Soviet Union. Many are stateless and disaffected, having refused to take language and history examinations to obtain citizenship in the countries where they live.

Russia’s staging of major military exercises with Belarus last month explains why the new law worries its neighbours. The Zapad (West) war games were based on the unlikely scenario of Lithuanian “terrorists” attacking the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad while ethnic Poles in western Belarus fought to join their compatriots in Poland. Having suppressed both threats, Russia then repelled an invasion from Estonia and Latvia.

Estonia was so alarmed that it called on Nato to expand a military exercise planned for the Baltic region next year. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s Foreign Minister, reacted this week by urging the United States to deploy troops in Central Europe as a “strategic reassurance” against Russia.

Zapad was the largest war games conducted by Russia and Belarus since the Soviet collapse, involving almost 13,000 troops and hundreds of tanks as well as a parallel exercise involving Moscow’s strategic nuclear forces. The Kremlin insisted that it was purely defensive but some analysts saw the drills as preparation for another war by a regime that has grown more assertive after its success in South Ossetia.

That remains unlikely, but may seem less so if presidential elections in Ukraine in January produce a result that closes the door on Russia remaining in Crimea. The notion of military intervention to defend one’s citizens in another country is not recognised in international law, as the European Union’s inquiry into the war in Georgia made clear.

On this basis, the Kremlin could invent a pretext to invade Britain to “protect” the estimated 300,000 Russians living in London. But Mr Medvedev has highlighted this aspect of his new defence law.

While stressing to legislators that intervention abroad would occur “only when absolutely necessary”, he said: “Our citizens must be protected in any part of the world and they must feel protected by the state.”

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