Sanctions, however, are not Russia’s worst problem. After growth ground to a halt in 2013, Russia has been in a deep economic recession. When and if Russia comes up with a new economic model of development to replace the now inoperable one based on a high and rising price for oil, European and other Western investors will start paying attention again. This is likely to be a long wait, at best. Meantime, money, which used to be called Russia’s main tool for getting ahead with “greedy Westerners,” has become scarce. Like the energy weapon, the money weapon is now in other hands. It is the United States that decides how much of Russia it wants in the global money market.
Quite apart from the money magnet, there are also political groups within the European Union who occasionally side with Moscow on various issues. These range from the unease about US dominance (felt, e.g., within the German Die Linke party or among a few of France’s surviving true Gaullists), to US spying on its allies (even among Chancellor Merkel’s CDU associates), to anti-Brussels nationalism (as among Marine Le Pen’s voters in France or Viktor Orbán’s supporters in Hungary). Most of these forces are either left or right of center, which makes it difficult for Moscow to build ideological alliances with them. Some European nationalists, such as the Polish PiS party, are vehemently hostile to Moscow. The Kremlin’s pragmatism is good for tactical connections but prevents long-term cooperation. As for the European political mainstream, it is largely skeptical or inimical to Russia’s policies.
Even where there is a certain amount of popular support for friendly relations with Russia, the political elite remains largely Western-oriented. In Moldova, with its mercurial and notoriously corrupt politics, even the Communist Party headed by a former Russian police general is pro-EU. Serbia, for all its occasional Russophile rhetoric, is on track toward long-term integration into the European Union. Montenegro is soon to be admitted to NATO. Bulgarian elites are historically anti-Russian, having joined with Germany against Russia in both world wars. Greece, like Hungary, is using Russian connections as a bargaining chip in their relations with the EU. Cyprus used to profit hugely from Russian money on the island, but it obeyed the eurozone demands which hit Russian depositors very hard.
Russia is usually accused of implementing divideand-rule policies toward the European Union. It is indeed difficult not to engage in this practice, given the absence of a common foreign policy in the EU. The twenty-eight member states of the EU have differing interests, experiences and views of Russia. There are the former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940; there is Poland, divided several times by Russia and Germany; but there is also France, with strong historical and cultural ties; Austria, with strong business connections; and Germany, with its rich and twisted history of relations with Russia, which remarkably reached the point of historical reconciliation that permitted the country’s reunification in 1990.
Any outside power – be that the United States or China – dealing with a Europe which is more than a common market but less than a federation would be seeking the best ways to promote its interests through individual influential members of the Union besides going to Brussels. Russia, with its centuries-long history of relations with all European countries, has been doing this naturally. To the Russians, Europe is still mainly Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain, plus two dozen middle- and small-sized countries. However, any advances that the Russians have been able to make in relations with one member can be checked and reversed by other members less friendly toward Moscow. With the accession of Central and Eastern European states to the EU, the skeptics have won a de facto veto on ties with Russia that are too close. After Berlin toughened its stance toward Moscow, the Union’s most powerful country also joined the ranks of the skeptics. So much for the argument about Russian-fed Trojan horses inside the EU.
For all the talk of Russia’s bullying its neighbors, which is not without foundation, what is most striking is how little influence Moscow actually wields beyond its borders, even in the former USSR. Russia’s “sphere of influence” is actually limited to the territories it physically sustains and protects: Abkhazia; Donetsk and Lugansk; South Ossetia; and Transnistria. Even Moscow-allied Belarus often acts rather independently from Russia. Minsk still recognizes Georgia and Ukraine in their 1991 borders and keeps active relations with both Tbilisi and Kiev; it has become a prime re-exporter of the EU foodstuffs that Moscow banned from crossing into Russia, and President Alexander Lukashenko is adamant that Belarus remains a sovereign country, independent from Russia. Kazakhstan is even more explicit in following its “multi-vector” foreign policy. Its president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, was offended by Vladimir Putin’s suggestions of Kazakhstan’s statehood being only a “recent” phenomenon and was reportedly “unnerved” by the Russian Navy’s October 2015 cruise missile strikes at Syria from the Caspian. The Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also includes Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, is remarkable for the lack of solidarity among its members with its de facto leader, Russia.
In the quarter-century since the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Russia has been dealing with the ruling elites in the newly independent states, usually seeking trade-offs with them, often subsidizing them, and – until very recently – ignoring their domestic opposition. For two decades it was prepared to stick to the 1991 borders and abandoned that stance only when the Kremlin saw a threat of NATO closing in, first in Georgia and then in Ukraine. So far, Russia has been reacting to revolutions and coups in the neighborhood rather than plotting and staging them. In Eastern Europe, Russia has finally “lost” Ukraine and Moldova; it has had to accept the massive growth of China’s economic and political influence in Central Asia and that of America (in Georgia) and Turkey (in Azerbaijan) in the South Caucasus. In the future, Russia’s sphere of influence is more likely to shrink further than to expand. The Russian Empire is definitely not making a comeback.
For about a decade and a half after the break-up of the Soviet Union, defending the rights of compatriots abroad – i.e., some 25 million Russians who were left behind in the newly independent states when the Russian state receded to its current borders – was a fringe activity perpetrated by Russian nationalists, often in opposition to the Kremlin. It was only in 2008 that President Dmitri Medvedev, in the wake of the Georgia war, fought ostensibly to protect South Ossetians against Georgian “genocide” and declared Russia’s right to defend and protect its co-ethnics, particularly in former Soviet territory, which was termed a “zone of privileged interests” of the Russian Federation.
In 2008, this essentially applied to the Ossetians, whom Georgian President Saakashvili tried to bring back, alongside their self-declared republic, into Georgia. Six years later, this argument was used by President Putin to support the actions he had ordered in Crimea and with regard to Donbass. Putin talked about Russians as “the world’s biggest divided nation,” put forth the concept of Novorossiya (“New Russia,” a historical term for the northern Black Sea coast conquered by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century) for the Russian-speaking southern and eastern provinces of Ukraine, and discussed “the Russian world” as a habitat of Russophones and those who associate themselves with Russian culture and the Russian state.