Over the past four years, it has also capitalized on U. First, it has employed relatively inexpensive diplomatic, military, intelligence, cyber, trade, energy, and financial tools to wield influence and expand its global footprint. Second, the Kremlin has been generally successful in managing the economic costs for example, Western sanctions of its foreign transgressions while garnering some benefits. Finally, the Kremlin is likely, largely for domestic political reasons, to up the ante in response to efforts by the administration of President Joe Biden to push back against Russian expansionism, subversion, disinformation, and human rights abuses.
The Kremlin wants to push back on U. The three western former Soviet republics—Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine—are the most important ones for Russia, but they have proved difficult targets for attempts to keep them in its sphere. Relations with Belarus have been much more challenging than the existence of the treaty establishing a union state with Russia would suggest.
President Alexander Lukashenko has driven hard bargains with Putin to gain maximum economic benefits in exchange for geopolitical loyalty. He has resisted pressure for closer political ties, and until recently he had engaged in geopolitical balancing between Russia and the West, with cyclical overtures to Western countries and occasionally even a relatively relaxed—by the standards of his regime—domestic political atmosphere. The dramatic deterioration of relations between the Lukashenko regime and the West after the brutal suppression of large-scale protests in Belarus following the deeply compromised August presidential election, and especially now after the forced landing in May of a passenger plane in Minsk and illegal detention of a prominent Belarusian dissident, has limited space for geopolitical maneuver between Russia and the West.
The relationship with Belarus is a challenge for Putin: a hard intervention to subdue Lukashenko has been out of the question as it would make a mockery of the union state and of the concept of Eurasian integration.
Closer ties may at times be problematic too, considering his record for brutality that rivals that of Putin. The relationship with Ukraine is also highly problematic for the Kremlin, albeit for entirely different reasons. However, the war has accomplished something that few had thought would be possible—a long-term antagonism between two nations with close historical, cultural, ethnic, and other ties.
Moldova suffered a brief but nonetheless traumatic conflict with Russia-supported separatists in the early s. The conflict has been extinguished, albeit not settled, but Moldova remains a distant prospect when it comes to closer geopolitical alignment with Russia.
As a result of its historical, trade, commercial ties, and military and security cooperation with countries in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia still retains the capacity to project power and influence in both regions. First, China has emerged as a strong competitor to Russia in the realms of trade, investment, technology, and infrastructure development.
Second, beyond China, Russia confronts a crowded playing field in both regions—the EU, the United States, and Turkey—and more nationalistic leaders who resent its heavy-handedness and inability to deliver on its promises.
Many of the countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus rely on remittances from migrant labor in Russia, but its attractiveness as an economic or geopolitical partner has diminished. Third, Russia and the regional institutions it has created—such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the EAEU—are not set up to tackle the major problems afflicting all countries in both regions—including poor governance, corruption, lack of accountability, transparency and the rule of law, and poverty and economic underdevelopment.
What is more, Moscow has shown little interest in helping them. Moscow has not been able to recruit new members since , and the union has suffered from internal divisions. This remains the case and is likely be true for the indefinite future.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, its position in Europe has experienced a significant deterioration following its aggression against Ukraine in Russia has persistently failed to take up opportunities for better relations with Europe, where its crude attempts at interference and blatant lies have frustrated leaders for years.
In the economic sphere, through its internal reforms the EU has reduced Russian leverage in energy trade. The Kremlin may have been successful in stirring up populist and nationalist sentiments within some European countries, but it has failed to weaken transatlantic institutions. The union was founded on democratic ideals and shared European values—alien ideas to a country where those values have never taken hold either in its politics or society. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once remarked that Western Europe has always sought to deprive the Russian people of the right to have their own faith and identity.
Russia has always resisted that perceived threat to its sovereignty. For most of Europe, maintaining a moderately civil relationship with Russia is an unavoidable burden rather than a source of opportunity. The Kremlin has tried to reestablish its influence in the region. It has relied on a wide array of tools—subversion, propaganda, influence operations, trade, energy, disinformation, and support for populist and nationalist movements—to secure its foothold and undermine the Western Balkans momentum toward integration with the EU and NATO.
Russia was unable to prevent Montenegro and North Macedonia from joining NATO in and respectively, even after an attempted coup in the former with involvement by Russian operatives in Russia is and will remain a European—rather than an Asian—power. Its other economic, military, security, and diplomatic interests in the region are of much less importance, and it will invariably subordinate these—and its relationships with other Asian countries—to the paramount importance of maintaining and strengthening its relationship with Beijing.
These ties, however, remain underdeveloped at best and strained at worst. Ties with South Korea tell much the same story. Russia has been more active in Southeast Asia over the past several years, but the results have been disappointing. There has been a slight increase in expanding arms sales, trade, and energy cooperation with several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—Russia provided the region with 26 percent of its arms between and with 61 percent of those sales going to Vietnam.
Russia has achieved important gains in the Middle East over the past decade. By reversing the course of the Syrian civil war and saving a long-standing ally, Russia sent a message to other Middle Eastern regimes that it is a reliable partner. Russia has established a long-term military and naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, but is hardly the only major actor in Syria, where it has to contend with Iran and Turkey, as well as a residual U.
These goals remain distant and will require a great deal of balancing and accommodation on the part of Russia to achieve. A picture taken on March 1, , shows a member of the Russian military police standing guard between the portraits of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad R and Russian President Vladimir Putin L hanging outside a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus. Moscow has reportedly supplied weapons, mercenaries, and even combat aircraft to the LNA, but with little success, as its attempts to capture Tripoli have been stymied by Turkish-backed pro-government forces.
That, however, remains a distant prospect. However, in an illustration of the limits of what Cairo is prepared to do for its Russian partner, it—presumably under pressure from Washington—appears to have backed out of an agreement to allow Russian planes access to Egyptian air bases.
In a region riven by fierce geopolitical and sectarian rivalries, the ability to talk to everyone without taking sides, while providing a measure of diplomatic flexibility, has limited value. At best, for the foreseeable future, it has positioned itself as an important geopolitical and military actor in a region of undisputed U. In other words, it appears more focused on the symbolism rather than the substance of engagement.
In October , Putin hosted the first Africa-Russia summit, 78 underscoring the symbolic importance the Kremlin attaches to the perception that Russia is now a player on the continent.
The summit generated a great deal of publicity, but few tangible results for the African countries that participated or for Russia. Russia accounts for less than 0. In only 0. It has leveraged its involvement on the continent to generate support for UN General Assembly resolutions it backs and to expand cooperation with local intelligence and security services. It not only faces formidable competitors in Africa—notably China, India, the United States, and the EU—but is also largely incapable, because of its limited resources, of helping African countries solve their most pressing problems, including poverty, ethnic and tribal conflicts, poor governance, and weak infrastructure.
Moscow will continue its attempts to gain footholds in Africa, but more likely than not with modest results. Over the past decade, Russia has attempted to expand its presence and influence in Latin America in pursuit of geopolitical, military, commercial, and energy interests. It has scored some successes, but mostly as a result of its ability to exploit U. However, the scale and scope of Russian engagement in Latin America should not be exaggerated.
Its reach is limited not only by resource constraints, but also by its lack of appeal as an economic and technology partner, as a source of foreign investment, and destination for exports. As a consequence, it brings little to the table that is of interest to the vast majority of countries in the region. In sum, Russia would have to make a substantially greater investment in the region, especially in its military footprint, to chip away at the U.
Understanding Russian power and its uses in all their dimensions poses a nuanced and complicated challenge. Its interference in elections in the United States and Europe, use of cyber operations, disinformation, military intimidation, intelligence operations, and the like will continue to threaten their security as long the East-West confrontation continues.
Moreover, while its modest capabilities for long-range power projection and limited soft-power appeal may not be enough to significantly expand its global influence, they can make Russia a useful partner to countries seeking to balance U.
Thus, a judicious approach to the task should rely on several key questions:. Russia will continue to occupy a prominent place on the U. Its vast size and position on the Eurasian continent, energy resources, proximity to U. But in responding to this challenge, it is important to avoid acting on the impulse to push back against every instance of Russian activism and instead to proceed in pursuit of priorities based on a sober assessment of Russian motivations and capabilities.
Its ambitions in many other parts of the world—the Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Western Hemisphere, the Arctic, 88 and even the states of the former Soviet Union—pose less serious concerns because they have little impact on core U. The adversarial character of the U. Because both countries engage in global pursuits, they are bound to cross paths in various parts of the world. It is critical that they manage their competition to mitigate the risk of conflict.
As two noted experts have observed, the two powers are not locked into a zero-sum existential contest for global geopolitical and ideological dominance. Threat inflation—driven by institutional and bureaucratic interests, financial incentives, domestic politics, and ideology—is an obvious problem that arises from getting Russia wrong.
Russia, like any major power, seeks to expand its influence and weaken the position of its perceived adversaries. But there is little evidence that the Kremlin operates according to some master plan or coherent grand strategy to spread its ideology around the world. Rather, Russian policy has been opportunistic but calculating. When the Kremlin sees an opening and judges the risks to be low or manageable, it will act decisively to protect or advance Russian interests, as has been the case in Syria.
It will rely on military force when it sees all other options as having been exhausted, as apparently was the case with Ukraine. The Kremlin appears likely to act with restraint when it judges the costs to outweigh the benefits.
It has refrained so far from sending troops to Belarus, where the Lukashenko regime has been able to suppress the opposition and where there has been little evidence of NATO and the EU preparing to intervene politically or otherwise.
It is a big leap to extrapolate from these objectives, as some analysts have done, a Russian campaign to replace the United States as the dominant power in the Middle East.
But underappreciation of the threat from Russia and misreading of its security requirements are also fraught with dangerous consequences.
The U. The result has been a situation in which the United States has overpromised and demonstrated its inability to deliver on the pledge for well over a decade. There is no ready-made recipe for translating these insights into off-the-shelf policies for the current U. But internalizing the lessons from hard-edged encounters with Russian power as well as the sources of U. The authors are grateful to Christopher Bort, Melvyn Leffler, Rajan Menon, and Andrew Weiss for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Grace Kier provided invaluable research assistance. The authors bear sole responsibility for any remaining errors of fact or judgment. The authors also wish to acknowledge the Charles Koch Institute for its generous support of this research effort. But according to President-elect Donald Trump and some of his Cabinet designees, friendlier relations with Moscow could benefit the U.
Is Russia a growing threat to be feared, or a valuable potential partner to embrace? We look at how Russia stacks up against the U. In return, Putin said he expected Russians to let him do as he pleased in politics. Amid street protests in over accusations of voter fraud in legislative elections, Vladimir Putin announced his campaign for a second stint as president and his efforts to make Russia strong again. For the past 20 years, life for most Russians did improve. They were able to send their children to university, sometimes even outside the country.
The improvement is most notable in larger cities compared to the countryside, where poverty is still a major problem in some regions, said Thoburn. Life expectancy , which was woefully low, started to go up in the years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, though it still ranks far lower than most Western countries, she said. Western countries, including the United States, placed sanctions on Russia when it annexed Crimea, and intervened in Ukraine and Syria.
How about the entrepreneurial climate? During Soviet times, Russia was known for its science prowess, and it still has many creative technologists and computer engineers today, said Thoburn. But the demands placed on entrepreneurs by the government tend to suppress new businesses, she said. During the protests, some people were using the social media website to arrange meetings and talk about the opposition.
The government asked Durov for information about the users, but he refused and ended up selling the company. Government control sometimes dissuades not only foreign investors, but wealthy Russians as well, who see it as risky to create new businesses, said Miller.
China ranked second with Russia in 13th place. Unemployment last spiked at But according to recent estimates from the U. In the European Union, environmental concerns and significant local reserves have made natural gas the fastest growing energy source. The Russian government wants to increase exports to Turkey and to double exports to Europe over the next 20 years.
Gazprom also intends to construct a huge trans-European pipeline from its Yamal peninsula in northwest Siberia to Germany; construct a bypass pipeline around Ukraine to avoid siphoning and illegal gas sales from the existing line; and enlist Finland in building another pipeline across the Baltic Sea from northern Russia to Germany.
Northeast Asia also emerged as an important prospective market. China, Japan, and South Korea would like to meet that demand through increased gas consumption to mitigate the costs of pollution and dependency on Middle East oil. In the s, this was nowhere more evident than in the Caspian Basin, where rich oil and gas deposits and the growing interest and investment of U. During the s, Russia and the three smaller countries squabbled over dividing the spoils of the Caspian Sea and over the direction of new export pipeline routes.
For most of the decade, Russia tried to preserve the old Soviet-era legal regime, which would have precluded the division of Caspian resources. It also fiercely resisted U. With the discovery of larger oil reserves than anticipated in the Russian sector of the Caspian and the sudden increase in world oil prices, the Russian government became more amenable to the delimitation of the Caspian Sea.
As Russian oil companies prospered, became international players, and searched for new export opportunities, they began to advocate engagement with the United States rather than confrontation in developing the Caspian Basin.
But Russia and the United States remain divided on other global oil issues—especially the interests of Russian energy companies in Iraq. LUKoil has a multibillion-dollar contract in Iraq to rehabilitate major oil fields once sanctions are lifted. In August , Iraq reassigned rights to oil fields previously held by the French to Russia and Russian oil companies. Disagreement on Iraq, U. Oil was the story of the s in the Caspian, but gas will be the subject in the coming decade if the focus shifts to Central Asia.
The Caspian is emerging as a major new global source of gas, with the bulk of proven reserves in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Iran, second only to Russia in gas reserves, is also technically a Caspian state and has exports and greater ambitions in regional markets.
Together, Russia and Iran are likely to dominate and direct Central Asian gas flows. Russia has far more control over Central Asian gas production and exports than it does over Caspian oil. All existing pipeline routes run through Russia, and international energy companies have failed to make the same inroads into Central Asian gas production as they have in Caspian oil. Russia and Iran will probably also predominate in South Asia. Gazprom is heavily involved in Iranian gas development and has made its own southern pipeline plans.
Indeed, in its public announcement of priorities for , Gazprom sketched out three, not two, major markets for the company: Europe, Northeast Asia, and South Asia.
As with oil, high prices—not production—have increased Gazprom revenues. Only one significant new gas field has been brought on line.
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