How Moscow lost friends and global influence |
Since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not only failed to achieve the military victory he craved, he has also undermined a slew of other relationships he spent decades building, leaving Russia more isolated than it has been since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The invasion of Ukraine alone was enough to drive a wedge between Russia and its ally Kazakhstan. After all, Putin has a history of diminishing Kazakhstan’s grounds for independent statehood and suggesting that its people desire closer ties with Russia — claims that echo those Putin makes about Ukraine.
So, after the 2022 invasion, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev rejected the Kremlin’s requests for assistance and later told Putin that Kazakhstan would not recognize Russia-backed separatist regions in Ukraine. He also signed a military cooperation deal with Turkey, becoming the first member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to establish such an arrangement with a NATO member. While Putin’s relationship with Tokayev has since improved, this likely reflects the fact that both sides still need each other.
Then there is Armenia. When Azerbaijan launched a military operation in September 2023 to take control of Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian enclave within its territory, Russian peacekeepers stationed there did nothing, and the enclave’s entire population — around 100,000 people — was forced to flee. Within a year, Armenia had announced plans to withdraw from the CSTO and was purchasing arms from France and India. Russia withdrew its peacekeepers from the region ahead of schedule.
The Kremlin also managed to upend its relationship with Azerbaijan, which........