What is Russia’s endgame?

Russian ambition.

The Russian Federation for years has been described in the West as a revisionist country destabilizing its near and distant abroad. The events in Georgia in 2008 and the constantly smoldering conflict with Ukraine are obvious examples of this narrative. In response, in the Russian media we can hear about large-scale Western propaganda against a country that defends its repressed citizens and also resists the rotten ideology imposed by the broadly understood West. To understand the Russian viewpoint, however, it is necessary to look at this country from a broader perspective.

State of constant vulnerability

Let's start by debunking the myth that ideology is the main motive for the Russian elite, and in particular for Putin. An example of such is the opposition to the liberal values promoted by the West. In 2019, Putin said in the Financial Times: “the liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder, and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected...So, the liberal idea has become obsolete." Apart from the views of individual persons, such statements are nothing more than a mere tool in the hands of the Kremlin and have an instrumental, not ideological, function. They add another tool to Russia's strategic goal of dividing Western unity.

The imperative of the Russian state's action should be sought in a constant sense of geopolitical threat. For an outside observer, this is an unintuitive statement. We are talking about the largest country in the world - with the second or third most powerful army in the world - located on the most important supercontinent - Eurasia, a landmass with probably the largest natural resources. However, what is a great Russian advantage is also its greatest burden. Russia was and is one of the least populated countries in the world without any geographical barriers that would strengthen its sense of security. For example, in the west, the Central European lowland is a highway to the Russian heartland, with the Smolensk Gate being the only serious terrain obstacle. Moscow remembers the great campaigns of Napoleon and Hitler, and the liberation of the Polish occupied Kremlin in 1612, which today is celebrated as a Russian national holiday.

The Russian perception of the world is a product of a long-standing sense of threat by world powers, which was enhanced by the economic supremacy of maritime states resulting from access to the world economy through the World Ocean. This feeling of insecurity is paradoxically what pushed the rulers of Russia to further territorial conquests. Concern for the core regions was driving Moscow to conquer the buffer regions. In the Kremlin's mind, these conquests were attacks preceding the planned attacks of the great powers. However, the rulers of the newly conquered regions, also due to a sense of threat, insisted on further gains while at the same time getting closer to the countries of the West and thus further winding up the spiral of vulnerability. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian dealing with Russia and the Soviets once wrote: “Russia simultaneously abutted Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. Such a circumstance should have argued for caution in foreign policy. But Russia had tended to be expansionist precisely in the name of vulnerability: even as forces loyal to the tsar had seized territory, they imagined they were preempting attacks [by other great powers]. And once Russia had forcibly acquired a region, its officials invariably insisted they had to acquire the next one over, too, in order to be able to defend their original gains. A sense of destiny and insecurity combined in a heady mix.”

In this light, Russia's grand strategy is based on the mentality of a besieged fortress. This was what pushed Moscow in 2008 to intervene in Georgia, which sought NATO accession, and to war with Ukraine, whose society was demanding a pro-Western turn. The latter caused the Russian elite to see a possibility of NATO troops in eastern Ukraine, an economically key region with wide access to the Russian underbelly, within the next 5-10 years. Likewise, maintaining Belarus, within which the Smolensk Gate is located, is a strategic goal for Moscow. For this goal, Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot, possibly including going to war.

The end of the unipolar world

However, Russia's offensive actions cannot be equated with the will to rebuild the empire in the Soviet sense of the word. Strong interference, even in post-Soviet countries usually comes at a high cost. Moscow elites rather see the rebuilding of power indirectly by influencing states with a range of leveraging tools to achieve politically determined goals and exert influence while bearing minimum responsibility. Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian geopolitical analyst, forecasts that the Kremlin in the third decade of the 21st century will rather limit the development of multilateral institutions that it has created in its near abroad, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization or the Eurasian Union, which will result in a decline in the importance of these formats. In return, Moscow's elite will be forced to re-examine the post-Soviet space and define new priorities and the tools to achieve them. An example of the new order and the decline in the importance of multilateral institutions was the conflict in Karabakh, which was finally moderated by two regional players - Russia and Turkey.

The decline in the importance of multilateral formats in Moscow's eyes is to affect not only the post-Soviet space, but the whole world. The unipolar order based on the undisputed primacy of the Americans is becoming a thing of the past, and this fact leaves its mark on the entire structure of international relations. Russia believes that major world players, including itself, will pursue their interests on a bilateral level rather than through international institutions based on US hegemony and the very nature of these relations will be much more direct, perhaps even brutal, using all leverage mechanisms - the military, economic power, and political pressure.

That is why breaking the consensus of the broadly understood Western world will remain one of the overarching goals of Russian policy. Starting from the ideological level, through the economic one with Nord Stream 2 at the fore, and ending with the military. In looking for an answer to the question of what is the purpose of the increased activity of the Russian Federation in Central and Eastern Europe, we will find an answer with the questioning of the agency of institutions based on Washington's omnipotence, and the European Union, whose security is also largely based on the USA. Even now, from the military strategy point of view, the defense of the Baltic states in the event of Russian aggression is highly doubtful. Thus, all the capitals of the region are asking themselves to what extent NATO's article 5 is causative. And if they aren't, they should raise that question.

The interior problem

The above-mentioned sense of anxiety among the elites in the Kremlin is growing not only due to the lack of territorial barriers and the proximity of world powers, but also due to the difficulty of centrally managing the vast Russian interior. Although Russian society is quite apathetic towards the apparatus of power, the warning signal for the elites was the outbreak of collective discontent in Belarus whose society was also considered passive and reconciled to authoritarian rule.

So far, the protests in Russia, although numerous, are taking place at the local level and concern regional issues. Those ruffled still do not reach a sufficient critical mass and even the poisoning of the oppositionist Alexei Navalny did not change that fact. Which doesn't mean there is nothing to be dissatisfied with. Apart from the all-encompassing corruption and superficial democracy, which is underlined by the recent constitutional referendum, thanks to which there is no longer any obstacle for Vladimir Putin to rule the country until 2036, Russian society is feeling the consequences of the Kremlin's policy first-hand.

Almost 20 million Russians live in poverty, and one-third of them declare that their income is only enough to buy food. Russians' income in 2020 was 13% lower than in 2013. This is a product of the difficult economic situation of the country resulting from Moscow's adventurous policy on the international arena which resulted in severe sanctions and economic alienation, as well as the dependence of the Russian economy on the sale of hydrocarbons. Upon examination, the structure of the Russian budget - in 2018 almost half of the revenues came from the sale of oil, its products, and natural gas. The strong entry into the US energy markets, which is already a net exporter of gas, along with the revamping of renewables by developed countries means that the future of a large part of Moscow's budget is unstable.

What is a great fear for the authorities is the Internet. TV programs, which usually narrate the Kremlin line, are increasingly the domain of the elderly. The young generation, in turn, primarily chooses the Internet. As many as 81% of them indicate the Internet as the primary source of acquiring knowledge about the country and the world, and 54% declare their trust in this medium. Despite numerous attempts to restrict the Internet, the Internet remains largely an area with freedom of information. For example, investigative materials describing Navalny's poisoning on YouTube were watched by 20 million people, while Putin's annual message on TV was watched by only 7 million. In the domestic domain, therefore, the sense of threat is a mixture of economic problems, largely a derivative of foreign policy, and the freedom of information enabled by the Internet.

A place at the table

So what is emerging from this whole picture? What is the goal of Russia? In theory, it is the same as for any other country, i.e. the protection of citizens' own interests in the international arena, while maintaining the state's subjectivity. At the moment, this subjectivity seems to be threatened only in one case - internal implosion caused by mass protests throughout the country and the emergence of a well-organized opposition. However, this is currently not a likely scenario. The elites in the Kremlin hope that with the collapse of the unipolar world, their agency on the bilateral plane, where they usually act from the position of power, will increase and, over time, will improve the country's economic condition. And this, together with the increase in authoritarian privileges for which the Kremlin cares, will ensure internal stability. Lukyanov claims that in the post-Covid reality it is the real power of states that will play the main role.

In the international arena, therefore, we can expect further efforts to create asymmetric relationships with individual countries that favor the dismantling of the collective of multilateral organizations with respect to which Moscow has a much worse negotiating position. In this context, the break-up of the European Union or NATO can be seen as Moscow's enduring strategic aspiration. However, this is not an end-goal in itself. That is achieving world power status and a seat at the table where only China and the United States are currently sitting. Such a position, in turn, would enable Russia to gradually regenerate the sphere of influence that the Kremlin sees within the borders of the former Soviet states and satellite states of the USSR. This plan is as ambitious as it is unrealistic. Washington and Beijing have no interest in inviting a third player who is many times weaker than them in many domains. In turn, the Russian sphere of influence has been violated from many sides for years. From the West by the EU and the US, from the East by China, and from the South by Turkey with its increasingly adventurous policy. Therefore, Russia's realistic goal is to maintain the decaying influence on the periphery, so that at the moment of the "New Yalta" forecasted by the Kremlin, which is a concert of powers and the division of influence in the world, Russia will be a part of these talks. For years, Putin has reminded how effective the decisions conducted by world powers with the participation of Moscow were, such as the Congress of Vienna in the post-Napoleonic era, or the Conferences in Yalta or Potsdam, and how tragic the Versailles Treaty was, where Russia was missing. This is, of course, one of the examples of the Kremlin building its own historical interpretation, but on this basis, Russia wants to take part in establishing a new international order in the 21st century. The problem is that compared to the world powers Russia's position in the 21st century is much weaker than in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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