Some critics of our support for Ukraine argue this is a regional conflict between two nations, and we shouldn’t be involved.
But Vladimir Putin, like Adolf Hitler, won’t be content with one nation — he wants to dominate Eurasia.
It is in the United States’ interest to aid Ukraine, rather than face a restored Russian Empire later.
From Belarus, which has become a vassal state whose dictator depends on the Russian security apparatus for his own political survival, through Serbia, whose president, Aleksandar Vucic, is Putin’s most reliable ally outside of the former Soviet Union, Russia has spent decades exploiting weak links, applying military pressure, running its political candidates and creating dependencies on Russia, to be leveraged at the time of Putin’s choosing.
Although struggling to put some distance between himself and Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Belarus’ Aleksandr Lukashenko has been Putin’s pawn, recently conducting negotiations in Beijing on Moscow’s behest.
No wonder Russian assistance played a key part in suppressing mass protests following his election in the summer of 2020, almost universally seen as fraudulent.
In Georgia and Moldova, meanwhile, Russian military presence has sustained phony breakaway republics that challenge the sovereignty of governments in Tbilisi and Chisinau.
In Georgia, the governing party of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who himself has business interests in Russia, has been doing the Kremlin’s bidding.
Moldova might have recently expelled two Russian “tourists” plotting a coup, but the Russian-sponsored Shor Party has managed to bring down a pro-Western government, miring the fragile country into political instability.
It is also in Russia’s interest to destabilize the Western Balkans and to keep it as far away from the West as possible — helped of course by Europeans’ reluctance to take EU enlargement to the East seriously, which has confined “candidate countries” of the region to an indefinite limbo. In 2016, Russians organized, but failed to execute, a coup in Montenegro to preempt the country’s eventual accession into NATO.
The new Russian Empire
Even as the invasion of Ukraine drags on, Russian President Vladimir Putin is destabilizing neighboring governments in hopes of building a new empire — or at least having a buffer zone of states allied with him.
BELARUS
Even though Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is a fierce Putin ally, Russia wants more. A leaked internal document from Moscow calls for the Union State of Russia and Belarus no later than 2030, accomplished by “referendum” not invasion.
MOLDOVA
Russia already recognizes the Transnistria region in the east as a breakaway state, and Moldova recently expelled two foreigners suspected of plotting a coup.
SERBIA
Russia has pushed its long-time ally to back the Ukraine invasion, but lately there have been rifts — as Serbia refused to provide weapons to Putin and have strengthened diplomatic ties with Europe.
GEORGIA
Russia has troops stationed in “breakaway republics” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which make up one-fifth of Georgia’s territory. Georgian officials are worried Russia will try to expand those holdings or destabilize the government.
ARMENIA
Russia backed the country in its war with neighboring Azerbaijan and expects its loyalty going forward.
KAZAKHSTAN, KYRGYZSTAN, TURKMENISTAN, TAJIKISTAN
Even after the fall of the Soviet Empire, Russia exerted control over these Central Asian nations, which have been ruled mostly by strongmen oligarchs aligned with Moscow. Last year, Putin helped put down a revolution in Kazakhstan and is intent on keeping close allies in power.
In Serbia, Russians find sympathetic interlocutors, similarly traumatized by the loss of their mini-empire in the 1990s, which they blame squarely on the United States and NATO.
Then there is Armenia, a nation of less than 3 million, with its protracted conflict with Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Although Moscow has recently done little to uphold its end of the bargain, Armenia has been part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a NATO-like pact created by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and continues to look to Moscow for solutions.
Putin also applies pressure to the “stans” — post-Soviet republics of Central Asia wedged uncomfortably between Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence.
Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, obviously has some discomfort with the arrangement, saying he was “alarmed by the increased rivalry and rhetoric of nuclear states,” in his address to the UN General Assembly in September.
While not joining Western sanctions against Russia, the government in Astana pledged not to violate the sanctions regime, either.
Yet Kazakhstan features a large Russian-speaking minority and shares with Russia the second longest continuous land border in the world (behind the US and Canada), making it uniquely vulnerable to Russian aggression.
Unsurprisingly, alongside Armenia or Turkey, Kazakhstan has become a key transit country through which coveted Western goods — from luxury items to chips — enter Russian markets, thus circumventing US and European sanctions.
Across these vast array of countries, there’s a common theme: absence of Western alternatives to Moscow’s (and, in some cases, Beijing’s) influence.
With the exception of security cooperation with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan during the War on Terror, when both countries hosted US military bases, Central Asia has not been high on the list of priorities of any US administration in living memory.
The recent stop of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Kazakhstan, on his way to the G20 meetings in India, should be applauded, but it will take much more than diplomacy to turn any of the region’s countries into reliable partners.
The same is true elsewhere. The EU has been criminally negligent by failing to provide a credible path of economic and political integration to countries in the Balkans and to Georgia, Moldova — and, indeed for a long time, Ukraine itself.
The horrors Russia has unleashed in the past year are an opportunity to rectify this collective failure of the Western alliance and bring some of these straying countries into the fold.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.
