Putin’s Empire, Interrupted
Putin's war against Ukraine has accelerated the very imperial unraveling it was meant to prevent
NOTE: I have just signed on to write a weekly column for Independence Avenue Media. I will be posting the intros and links to the full columns here regularly.
The Ukrainian military is defeating him. The Ukrainian president is mocking him. The Moldovan president is defying him. And on top of all that, the Armenian people just gave him a firm slap down at the ballot box.
One of the defining features of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s quarter-century rule has been a determined and persistent effort to reassert Moscow’s control over the former Soviet space, effectively trying to recreate the Russian Empire. But with the notable exceptions of what I’ve called Russia’s “soft annexation” of Belarus and its state capture in Georgia, Putin’s imperial project is clearly going off the rails. Putin’s empire is being interrupted.
The catalyst for this evolving failure is Putin’s flailing war against Ukraine, which has sapped Moscow’s resources and bandwidth, while at the same time forcing countries in the region to take steps to inoculate themselves from Russia’s imperial ambitions.
Strong column—the "end of the near abroad" point lands, and long-term I think it's right: Russia's grip is weakening. But it's a long road, not a turning point. Influence here moves as a sine wave—every trough brings a rollback. Orange Revolution 2004, then Yanukovych 2010. Belarus 2020 looked like Lukashenko's end; it bound him to Moscow instead. And the states that matter most barely figure: Uzbekistan, whose president showed up at this year's SPIEF, and Kazakhstan, which Putin visited just recently—both still very much in the room.