CHATHAM HOUSE - Research paper - Competing visions of international order 03 Russia stakes global ambitions on regional dominance Professor Alexander Cooley

 

CHATHAM  HOUSE -  Research paper -  Competing visions of  international order 

03 Russia stakes global ambitions on regional dominance

Professor Alexander Cooley

Academy Faculty Member, The Queen Elizabeth II Academy, Chatham House; Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University

Russia is using regional hegemony to secure its great power status, recasting the Ukraine war as a global conflict against the US-led international order. But whether Russia would thrive in a post-Western world is far from clear.

For more than two decades, Russia has viewed itself as a regional leader and a great power in an emerging multipolar world. It has assumed an increasingly assertive and aggressive revisionist stance towards the US-led liberal international order, with its elites framing the war in Ukraine as central to Moscow’s campaign to transform that order and to usher in a post-Western world. These regional and global ambitions are inextricably linked in Russian foreign policymakers’ minds: if Russia does not project enduring influence in its neighbourhood, its global aspirations cannot be realized. Accordingly, the local or regional war in Ukraine – beyond questions of territory, Russian identity and regional security – has been recast by Moscow as a global conflict about the very essence of international order and as an attempt to oppose US-led Western hegemony.

Russia’s vision of its place and role in the international order rests on three main pillars. First, Russia seeks to maintain leadership and control over the post-Soviet states, which it regards as forming its sphere of influence or ‘special zone of privilege’.34 It has exerted influence through a mix of coercion, creation of regional organizations under Russian leadership, support for breakaway territories to pressure the governments of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, and the maintenance of a strong network of security and economic ties across the region. Countering Western influence and engagement in these countries is also a strategic priority by extension.

Second, Russia aims to secure its global standing as a great power in a post-Western, multipolar world. Its regional hegemony provides the basis for its global great power status, while its elites view the waning of US hegemony and global leadership as a necessary step in institutionalizing a new order.35 Relatedly, on regional issues like Afghanistan and the Hamas–Israel war, or on global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, Russian officials reflexively point to Western policies, values and interventions as the drivers of regional instability and international non-cooperation.

Moscow regards its campaign to sow divisions in the West as the natural extension of its aim to promote a post-Western world order, and sees these efforts as the geopolitical equivalent to Western campaigns to promote democracy and liberal values abroad.

Third, Russia seeks to undermine Western political unity and foreign policy consensus. It works to erode support in the West for transatlantic institutions, allies and political communities, backing political elites and parties that oppose NATO and the European Union. Moscow also seeks to exacerbate political polarization and separatist movements in Western countries through disinformation operations. It regards its campaign to sow divisions in the West as the natural extension of its aim to promote a post-Western world order, and sees these efforts as the geopolitical equivalent to Western campaigns to promote democracy and liberal values abroad.

The impact of the war in Ukraine

Moscow opportunistically uses international crises and conflicts to promote its revisionist agenda. The war in Ukraine has turbocharged efforts across all three pillars of Russia’s international ordering strategy.

Moldova has been a strong supporter of Ukraine but other post-Soviet states have been divided, remained silent or maintained public neutrality when it comes to the war. Georgia, for example, has refused to follow the West in imposing economic sanctions on Russia. In Central Asia, public opinion on who is to blame for the war ranges from being relatively evenly split (in Kazakhstan) to strongly backing the Russian position and blaming the West, Ukraine and NATO (in Kyrgyzstan).36 Central Asian elites are concerned about a resurgent Russia’s broader territorial ambitions and disregard for sovereign borders. However, such wariness does not translate into openly aligning with the West against Russia but instead into increasing engagement with as many foreign policy partners as possible (such as China, Japan, South Korea and the Gulf states).

At the same time, rather than causing these countries to extricate themselves from their ties with Russia, the war in Ukraine has fostered new network connections and opportunities for population mobility across the region. Central Asian labour migrants continue to go to Russia in record numbers, while two waves of Russian emigrants, or relokanty (mostly displaced IT workers and conscription evaders), have boosted the Russian presence in capital cities across Central Asia and the South Caucasus.37 Most importantly, sanctions evasion is booming, driven by regional business and political elites who actively collaborate with Russian firms and customs officials to maintain the operation of re-export chains and routes.

Russia’s attempt to gain global support for its war has had limited success, especially in the first months when it framed the ‘special military operation’ as being necessary to ‘de-nazify’ Ukraine.38 Later, Russia pivoted to frame the conflict as a full-fledged proxy war against Ukraine’s Western supporters over the future of the international order. Moscow’s diplomatic efforts in the Global South have sought to generate solidarity with itself against US hegemony, interventionism and imperialism. Opinion polls beginning in 2023 have suggested that international support for Ukraine is diminishing, even among countries that initially voted at the UN to support its sovereignty.39 Most notably, in April 2023, Brazil’s president Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva not only refused to send military assistance to Ukraine but also stated that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was equally culpable for the war.40

Moreover, as the war has gone on, Russia has pragmatically bolstered its war effort with the support of several Middle Eastern or Asian countries. Since the autumn of 2022, Iran has supplied Russia with more than 8,000 Iran-developed drones, many used for long-range attacks into Ukraine, and has reportedly transferred the technology for their production to within Russia.41 Despite its official stance of neutrality, China continues to supply Russia covertly with dual-use goods and complete weapons systems. Perhaps most dramatically, after signing a mutual defence treaty, North Korea has sent more than 10,000 troops to fight on Russia’s behalf, beginning in the Ukrainian-occupied region of Kursk.42 As Western Europe has supported Ukraine, Russia has been increasingly backed by non-European allies and partners in a conflict taking place within the European theatre.

After an initial, intense period of stigmatization in the West that saw even Russia-friendly politicians quickly distance themselves from its actions, Moscow has cultivated a network of commentators and policymakers to pressure Kyiv into entering peace talks and to reduce Western support to Ukraine. In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, Russia continued to support a network of right-wing commentators, founded a number of authentic-looking local digital media outlets, and then, on election day on 5 November, it appeared to make a number of bomb threats to polling locations across several swing states. Moscow’s hopes appeared to have paid off: Following Donald Trump’s inauguration, the US president initiated direct bilateral negotiations with Moscow on the terms of a ceasefire that appeared favourable to the Kremlin, while threatening Ukraine with the cut-off from US assistance and intelligence-sharing.

Finally, Russia’s intelligence and security services are increasingly determined to infiltrate and to repress the activities of Russians who fled to the West when the war began.43

Russian perceptions of US power

For some time, Russia’s elites have openly asserted that the US is in decline as a global hegemon and that, consequently, the international system is unstable and undergoing a profound transformation. Many of them also say the war in Ukraine is the result of this instability and changing international dynamics. Still, most Russian elites, who had become accustomed to framing the West as fragmented, were taken by surprise by the degree of its initial unity, including over coordinated sanctions, the expansion of NATO membership to Finland and Sweden, and the supply of weaponry to Ukraine, as well as by the withdrawal of the Western private sector from Russia.

For some time, Russia’s elites have openly asserted that the US is in decline as a global hegemon and that, consequently, the international system is unstable and undergoing a profound transformation.

Russia’s elites routinely level a host of criticisms at US foreign policy, but three are especially resonant.

The first criticism is that the US liberal democracy agenda has long been a cover for forcing disruptive regime changes around the world. Russian analysts point to the Colour Revolutions that ousted post-Soviet rulers in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) in favour of more Western-oriented opposition figures following street protests triggered by flawed elections. They regarded those events as geopolitical moves, rather than the product of domestic discontent. They believed that these protests were the direct result of the actions of the US or of US-backed external actors, such as democracy non-governmental organizations and regional donors. This narrative was reinforced during the Arab Spring in 2011, when the US similarly appeared to encourage the toppling of rulers across the Middle East, including long-time allies such as Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Russia’s elites commonly equate democracy promotion with regime change and point out that the result of US interventions is instability and chaos, citing Libya as a prime example.

The second charge is that the US’s alleged support for a rules-based order is acutely hypocritical, especially with US officials invoking the importance of rules, norms and international law only when convenient. In his address after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and in his speech that marked the annexation of four occupied provinces of eastern Ukraine in 2022, President Vladimir Putin made multiple references to Western hypocrisy and double standards (and even ‘triple standards’). From this perspective, the outbreak of the Hamas–Israel war has not only turned the global spotlight away from Ukraine; it has also allowed Russian policymakers to underscore how the US in its Middle East policy routinely ignores UN declarations, international law and global public opinion.

A third critique is that of US-led economic imperialism and Washington’s coercive and geopolitical use of dollar diplomacy. Russia’s elites have been critical of the purpose and justification of US and Western sanctions on their country since 2014, and the more robust ones imposed since 2022 have spurred Moscow to take practical and diplomatic steps to alleviate their impact. Russian academics and analysts have a robust research programme on the evolution, purpose and forms of US and Western sanctions.44

Foreign policy instruments

In Western policymaking circles, Russia tends to be viewed as a declining or regional power, with neither the capabilities nor the global influence of China, the main strategic competitor of the US.45 This ignores the disruptions that Russia has caused for the international system and Western interests, as well as the evolution of its toolkit to effect change in several aspects of the international order.

Military force

The most important element of Russia’s toolkit is the use of force to achieve its political and strategic aims. Even before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia had forcibly intervened in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 by annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in the east of the country. Further afield, Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015 to support the teetering regime of President Bashar al-Assad was initially successful, supporting the regime until its collapse in December 2024. Moscow has consistently promoted its global reputation as a guardian of political stability, especially among authoritarian regimes.

The first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revealed significant weaknesses in its large kinetic operations, as the Ukrainian military repelled Russian advances, destroyed symbolic Russian targets in the Black Sea and regained some territory, most notably Kherson. However, since 2023, Russia’s military has proven more effective, including in halting the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and it has since achieved incremental gains as Ukraine’s munitions supplies have dwindled. The severe loss of troops has not changed elite thinking about the cost of the war or moved public opinion to oppose it.

Regional and non-Western organizations

Upon becoming president in 1999, Putin made re-engaging with the post-Soviet states a priority. For this purpose, Russia launched regional organizations to institutionalize its control over its neighbours, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Customs Union, which in 2014 became the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). These organizations mimicked some of the institutional features of NATO and the EU, respectively, but Western policymakers mostly dismissed them as ineffective or politically not worthy of engagement.46

Since the start of the war in 2022, the relevance of these regional bodies has been mixed. The CSTO’s legitimacy has been threatened by Russia’s refusal to defend or intervene on behalf of its fellow member Armenia, which was ousted from Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan’s forces in September 2023. As a result, public opinion in Armenia has shifted against Russia and Moscow’s security guarantees have lost credibility. Just a few weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, however, Russia had achieved its greatest success when CSTO peacekeepers entered Kazakhstan at the request of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who was facing street protests, to defend symbolic targets and affirm Russia’s support for him.

By contrast, the frequently criticized EAEU has provided the legal architecture for much of Russia’s sanctions evasion and thriving re-export trade, allowing Russian businesses to reflag abroad, enabling the re-export of repurposed and dual-use goods (many from China) via Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and facilitating Russian firms and citizens in opening foreign bank accounts.

Russia’s elites are strong backers of its membership in non-Western groups and organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group47 and of the expansion of these, which they view as building the fabric of a global governance that is not controlled by the West. Russia views these organizations as forums to criticize the West and to promote counter-ordering agendas in different regions.

International law

Russia’s membership in regional organizations also bolsters its broader claims to be a champion and guardian of international law. Moscow values and defends its permanent seat in the UN Security Council, but its interpretations of the applicability of international law have evolved as a function of its dissatisfaction with the liberal international order.48

The West’s unilateral recognition of Kosovo as an independent state in 2008 and the US argument that this would not set a precedent were particularly criticized in Russia, where this was viewed as a prime example of Washington only following international law when it is geopolitically convenient. The Kosovo decision also provided Moscow with a precedent to justify its recognition of the independence of Georgia’s breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that same year.49

In 2015, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that it retained the authority to override rulings of the European Court on Human Rights (which Russia had previously regarded as binding) if it determined that the rulings were incompatible with the constitution.50 The local referendums preceding Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and in the four occupied eastern Ukrainian provinces in 2022 were obviously shams, but they were indicative of Moscow’s desire to justify its territorial grabs through some type of international legal process.

Counter-norms

Russia puts forth a constant critique of liberal democracy and the Western promotion of liberal causes. In 2019, Putin argued that liberal ideas are ‘obsolete’ and that ‘traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist’.51 Russia has consistently pushed ‘traditional values’ as a global counter-norm to liberalism, emphasizing the traditional family and promoting the role of state religion and, more recently, a pro-life agenda. Tellingly, in his 2022 annexation speech, amid his ranting about US imperialism, Putin also railed against the evils of gender-reassignment surgery.52 Championing traditional values has made Russia politically appealing to some right-wing and conservative movements in Europe and the US, including through new transnational networks formed by groups like the World Congress of Families. Russia’s elites have also promoted the norm of civilizational diversity that China puts forward and sought to emphasize the importance of sovereignty and security.53

Information warfare

Russia uses its information warfare capability to promote disinformation at multiple levels (local, national, regional and global) through a complex ecosystem that includes state media, content-sharing agreements, social media and the strategic use of fake media outlets. From targeting regimes and factions in African countries to promoting anti-Western vaccine messages across Latin America, to spreading disinformation about the 2024 US presidential election,54 Russia has developed an effective network designed to highlight the failures of the liberal international order and to promote political polarization in the West. Its information efforts are less focused on promoting positive views of Russia, although this is often used in the West as a standard for judging their efficacy, which mistakenly equates information warfare with ‘soft power’.

Providing public goods

Russia has repeatedly attempted to act as an alternative provider of public goods, but this is one area of international ordering where it has proven ineffective. For example, during the financial crisis of 2008–09, it unsuccessfully attempted to leverage emergency financial assistance to other countries to extract foreign policy concessions, including trying to get Belarus to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia also offered Kyrgyzstan an emergency loan with the demand that it close the Manas airbase, which the US used to stage troops in and out of Afghanistan. However, although President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced the base’s closure, he later renewed the lease for a higher annual rental payment. Around that time, Russia similarly failed in its attempts to negotiate military access in exchange for emergency financing in such countries as Cyprus, Iceland and Vietnam.

Russia has repeatedly attempted to act as an alternative provider of public goods, but this is one area of international ordering where it has proven ineffective.

Simply put, Russia’s resources for providing assistance to other countries are not at the level of those of China or even of Saudi Arabia. Moscow has accepted that it is no longer competing in Eurasia with Chinese public-goods initiatives like the Belt and Road, and it now includes Chinese infrastructure integration projects in its concept of a Greater Eurasia.55

A more recent example of Russia’s limited success with regard to public goods was its efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to leverage its Sputnik V vaccine.56 After announcing with great public fanfare that Russian scientists had developed the world’s first vaccine against the virus, Moscow mostly failed to deliver on contracted commitments to purchasing countries, becoming mired in regulatory difficulties and corruption procurement scandals, which made Sputnik V a more marginal player in vaccine geopolitics than its Western and Chinese counterparts.57

The liberal international order

Russia has a shaky record as a revisionist power leading global efforts to dismantle the US-led liberal international order. However, the assumptions of liberal internationalism about Russia have also been debunked. Most notably, the long-held assumption in certain Western countries that economic interdependence in areas like energy, information technology and consumer goods would change Russia’s interests or temper its revanchism has proven to be incorrect.

In the case of the Ukraine war, Russia’s opportunistic global messaging that it is the vanguard of anti-Western imperialism, while rightly derided by Ukraine and its supporters, resonates in other countries. This complicates Western debates about supporting Ukraine with local, regional and global considerations that seem far removed from the actual triggering causes of the war.

Even if Western support for Ukraine diminishes and the country is somehow forced into a settlement on Russian terms, it is not at all clear that such a settlement or a resulting post-Western world would be one in which Russia would thrive or retain the same international prominence that it enjoys now as the leader of an anti-US revisionist bloc. The historian Stephen Kotkin has argued that the least likely of all the possible scenarios for Russia’s future is the one predicted by its foreign policy elites, namely that the country will remain a great power with a regional sphere of influence in a multipolar world.58 It is more likely, Kotkin argues, that Russia assumes a global rogue status more akin to that of North Korea or becomes China’s vassal.

Navigating China–US rivalry

Discussions about Russia’s vision for international order rightly zero in on its relationship with China. Putin and President Xi Jinping have portrayed China–Russia relations as growing ever closer and as a ‘partnership without limits’. Three key points stand out in this regard.

First, the war in Ukraine, despite (or perhaps because of) Russia’s military difficulties, has brought the two countries closer. Although China remains officially neutral, it holds a pro-Russia type of neutrality that includes agreeing with Moscow’s position about the causes of the conflict and about NATO expansion, denouncing Western economic sanctions and the weaponization of the dollar, and opposing liberalism and democracy. There are also some interaction effects. For example, in May 2022, in reaction to individual sanctions by the West against Russian oligarchs, China barred its high-level officials and their family members from owning overseas bank accounts.59 Researchers have found that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a demonstration effect that may increase public support in China for using military force against Taiwan.60

Second, differences exist between China and Russia on certain matters, but these are not yet sufficient to change the overall emphasis on their strategic partnership. Beijing has proven to be a tough negotiator on important bilateral gas projects (such as the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline), and Moscow’s pivot to the East cannot make up for its loss of Western markets and investments. China has also warned Russia about the danger of using a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. But, overall, there is little official public disagreement between them. Beijing also appears to acknowledge that the US would be focusing entirely on China if it were not for the war in Ukraine.

Russia may not fully trust China but it will continue to cooperate and expand ties with its neighbour in its bid to oppose the US-led order, as well as to forge closer economic and security relations with countries that the US considers as rogues and rivals, such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

Third, the partnership between China and Russia follows a pattern seen for some time across Eurasia. The relationship may be asymmetrical in favour of China, but this does not prevent mutual accommodation, if only because the two share a common cause in opposing the US-led liberal international order. For example, they coordinated to deny the US basing rights in Central Asia during its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and they engaged with Afghanistan and its neighbours to advance their respective regional agendas. Russia may not fully trust China but it will continue to cooperate and expand ties with its neighbour in its bid to oppose the US-led order, as well as to forge closer economic and security relations with countries that the US considers as rogues and rivals, such as Cuba, Iran and 

North Korea.

Another wrinkle in the geopolitics of the Beijing–Moscow axis is the second Trump administration. A number of Trump officials have emphasized that it is China, not Russia, that constitutes the main threat and strategic competitor to the US. Accordingly, settling the conflict in Ukraine and forcing European countries to assume greater responsibility for their security are viewed as critical for refocusing US resources and attention on China in the Pacific. Politically, polling indicates that most members of the US Republican base do not regard Russia, despite its invasion of Ukraine, as the main threat to the US, and it appears unlikely that Kyiv will again see the types of aid packages that the Biden administration assembled.61

Moreover, even if a US strategic reorientation towards Asia takes place, it is unclear whether Moscow will make any type of meaningful concessions to Ukraine and its Western backers to settle the conflict, such as allowing Kyiv Western-backed security guarantees. Three years after commencing the limited ‘special military operation’, the war has cost Russia hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. However, Moscow’s increasing networking and pragmatic cooperation with global partners and the prospect of eroding Western unity have emboldened its revisionist aspirations and agenda despite – or even because of – these sunk costs.