After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, many Western analysts and scholars who study post-Soviet countries expected those countries’ governments and publics to express solidarity with Ukraine and denounce Russian attempts to reclaim territory and deny Ukraine’s sovereignty. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the post-Soviet states have sought to consolidate their independence, forging links with the West and other regional players while remaining mindful of the need to manage their relations with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, has since 1999 made reestablishing influence over Russia’s “near abroad” a strategic priority in his bid to justify his great-power aspirations.
Putin began his tenure by waging an aggressive military campaign to bring Chechnya back under Moscow’s control. And over the course of the next decade, he intensified his attempts to curb Western influence across the post-Soviet space, opposing the continued presence of U.S. military bases in Central Asia and the so-called color revolutions that brought more Western-friendly governments into power in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. The Kremlin justified its 2008 war with Georgia as an effort to protect Russia’s “privileged” sphere of influence in the “near abroad.” Moscow’s strategic priority to blunt Western influence in its region has now culminated in its “special military operation” in Ukraine and a three-year standoff with the West over Ukraine’s future.
Western leaders assumed that a fear of becoming Russia’s next target would encourage post-Soviet countries, particularly those that share borders with Russia, to support Ukraine’s fight to defend its sovereignty. In practice, however, most of the other post-Soviet states have carefully avoided denouncing Russian aggression or adopting a framing of their Soviet past as colonialism. Most have taken a pragmatically neutral stance instead, expressing concern about the conflict while refusing to publicly condemn Moscow, support Kyiv in UN votes, or join the Western sanctions regime against Russia. Indeed, since the war in Ukraine broke out, rather than tilt toward the West, the post-Soviet states have deepened and even forged new connections to their former imperial center. Some increases in Russian trade and investment in Central Asia extended preexisting economic networks and patterns of labor migration, but others—such as the influx of Russian information technology workers into the Caucasus and Central Asia’s facilitation of Russia’s efforts to evade Western sanctions—have been more unexpected.
Crucially, these developments do not merely reflect a fear of Russian retribution. Instead, the resilience of Russia’s influence reflects the diligent work Putin has put in to establish and cultivate formal and informal regional institutions, networks, and partnerships within the former Soviet domain, often in an attempt to create counterweights to Western-backed organizations such as NATO and the European Union. These post-Soviet organizations and initiatives have vastly increased the quantity of people, goods, and even ideas flowing between Russia and its post-Soviet neighbors and created new mechanisms for alliances and common causes. They have also allowed Moscow to use regional economic agreements and supply chains to evade Western sanctions. This means that it was never going to be as easy as many Western observers anticipated to isolate Russia or to convince the post-Soviet states that they would be better off extricating themselves from Moscow’s orbit. Russia will continue to cultivate its sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. The West would do better to prioritize finding ways to selectively engage with each of these states that go beyond simply offering membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions—offers that require slow and difficult processes and that may not actually end in acceptance.
SYSTEM RESTORE
At the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union broke into 14 independent states, not including Russia. Three (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are in the Baltics; three (Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine) lie west of Russia; three (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) are in the Caucasus region, in a corridor leading to the Middle East; and five are in Central Asia, sharing borders with Afghanistan and China. During the 1990s, Russia—its state greatly weakened and its economy in transition—was consumed with its own domestic problems. Its preeminent challenge was to deal with the vast number of strategic and military assets that lay stranded in other countries, not to reassert its political and economic influence. When it sent peacekeepers to Georgia to help manage the country’s so-called frozen conflict, it obtained a UN mandate to do so in Abkhazia, although not South Ossetia.
Soon, however, these post-Soviet states’ trajectories began to diverge. The Baltic states made determined attempts to integrate with the West and, in 2004, were granted membership in both the EU and NATO. Putin’s plan for resurrecting Russia as a great power, however, relied heavily on consolidating other former Soviet countries in Moscow’s sphere of influence. In 2002, Russia founded the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a regional grouping including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan joined in 2006 after its eviction of the United States from a military base, although it withdrew again in 2012 when U.S.-Uzbek ties rewarmed.
On the economic front, Russia supplied cheap energy and pushed a series of regional initiatives to bolster economic integration: it established the Eurasian Economic Community, loosely modeled on the former European Economic Community, and in 2007, it formed an even tighter customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, establishing a common external tariff. In 2014, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Russia formed a more comprehensive Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) with a supranational governing institution; Kyrgyzstan joined in 2015. When Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from the EU’s Eastern Partnership under Russian pressure and expressed a preference for joining the EAEU, that triggered the Euromaidan protests that eventually led to the collapse of his government.
Moscow also used authoritarian tools to curry favor with regional leaders and reestablish its influence, explicitly countering Western outreach efforts. After Russia, in 2012, implemented a so-called foreign agent law that stigmatized nongovernmental organizations accepting money from abroad, the Kremlin sought to disseminate that anti-Western NGO playbook to other post-Soviet states, providing model legislation that restricted protest and the types of advocacy such groups could pursue. Putin also encouraged regional authoritarian leaders to curtail the influence of international election observers and democracy watchdogs, and in the wake of Yanukovych’s overthrow, annexed Crimea in 2014. Additionally, Moscow used the extraterritorial provisions in the framework for the Commonwealth of Independent States—an association formed in 1991 by ex-Soviet republics—and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s antiterrorism convention to designate political dissidents as extremists and facilitate their extradition. In 2015, Moscow then passed the even more extreme Undesirable Organizations Law, which outlawed most Western-based NGOs entirely—a regulation that Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, imitated when he shut down over 1,600 NGOs after the eruption of antigovernment protests. And in January 2022, just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin deployed Russian troops to Kazakhstan under a CSTO mandate to shore up the rule of its friendly president.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine made clear how just deeply connected post-Soviet states still are with Russia. It also introduced new forms of entwinement. Russia’s acute wartime labor shortage ensured that it remained the primary destination for millions of Central Asian workers, even as Central Asian governments and migrants tried to diversify their destinations. In 2024, nearly 3.3 million Central Asian migrants worked in Russia.
Crucially, the war triggered a new trend of reverse migration. After Moscow banned most Western tech companies in March 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russian IT workers suddenly became unemployed. According to official Russian figures, about 100,000 of them—ten percent of Russia’s IT workforce—left the country over the course of that year, heading primarily to nearby countries for which they did not need entry visas, including Georgia, Turkey, and EAEU member states. These relocations swiftly transformed the economies that received Russian tech workers. For instance, for a decade after the 2008 global financial crisis, Armenia’s GDP growth had hovered between three and eight percent. But in 2022, it grew nearly 13 percent, driven almost entirely by a 20 percent expansion of the information and communication technology sector after the arrival of Russian IT specialists. By the end of 2022, 110,000 Russians had moved to Georgia, spurring similarly impressive economic growth but also generating social tension between Russian-speaking and Georgian communities as well as an affordable housing crisis.
Even more Russians fled their country out of opposition to the war or to avoid conscription after Russia launched its partial mobilization in September 2022 and began drafting hundreds of thousands of men. The Russian government does not keep comprehensive statistics on emigration, but the research platform Re: Russia has estimated that 820,000 to 920,000 people left Russia between February 24, 2022, and July 2023. According to official Russian migration statistics, Russians made half a million more trips to Central Asia in 2022 than they had annually over the prior half-dozen years.
Russia has attempted to monitor this outflow and to stymie antiwar activism beyond its borders. The country’s security services have increasingly pressured their regional counterparts to deny entry to Russian war opponents and political exiles and to clamp down on antiwar protests in their countries. Between 2022 and 2024, extradition treaties between Russia and the Central Asian states enabled the arrest of at least seven Russian dissidents in Kazakhstan and four in Kyrgyzstan. In June 2023, Kyrgyzstan—with Russia’s support—introduced a new facial recognition system that has since been used to identify Russian antiwar dissidents; in the same month, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan inked data-sharing agreements with Moscow that provide Russian authorities with personal information such as migration registration, citizenship status, and property and criminal records. All these new security links have helped chill the activities of Russian dissidents abroad. One indicator of the growing importance that Russia assigns to Central Asia is that, between February and December 2022, Putin himself visited every Central Asian country and attended more than 50 meetings with his Central Asian counterparts.
SHORT CIRCUITS
The war in Ukraine also revealed how post-Soviet regional economic networks and institutions had evolved into channels that could be used to circumvent Western sanctions. The EAEU provided a legal architecture that enabled the reexport of restricted goods from the West to Russia through post-Soviet countries. As a 2023 study by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development documented, official trade between Russia and the EU, the United Kingdom, and the United States contracted severely after February 2022, but each of those countries saw its trade with the post-Soviet states surge. That rise was accompanied by a corresponding increase in trade between Russia and Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, including a 30 percent increase in goods targeted by sanctions, relative to other goods. Overall trade between Russia and Kazakhstan, for instance, increased to $26 billion in 2022 and then again to $27 billion in 2023 from $24 billion in 2021. Kazakhstan’s computer imports totaled $1.2 billion in 2022, a sevenfold increase over 2021, with $310 million coming from the EU. According to a Bloomberg report based on the EU’s Eurostat database, Central Asian states stripped microchips from EU appliances including washing machines and refrigerators and then shipped the chips off to Russia.
In December 2023, the EU adopted regulations to try to curtail the reexport of dual-use goods and aviation and military technologies, and the United States has regularly added Central Asian companies to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list. But regional workarounds persist. In 2022, Georgia exported $904 million worth of cars, representing 16.2 percent of all its exports, an increase of 98 percent from its 2021 auto exports. Although the Georgian government banned the reexport of cars to Russia in August 2023, car exports from Georgia have continued to grow, reaching $1.95 billion in 2023 and $2.43 billion in 2024. Last year, cars accounted for 37 percent of all Georgian exports. The primary destination was Kyrgyzstan, which has become a major reexport hub to Russia.
Importantly, reexporting between different legal regimes is itself a post-Soviet practice. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kyrgyzstan leveraged its dual membership in the World Trade Organization and what was then the Eurasian Customs Union to systematically facilitate the reexport of Chinese goods into Russia and other neighboring states. Now, China—Russia’s main supplier of restricted and dual-use technologies such as drones—is also making use of neighboring Central Asian states to resupply Moscow. According to official Chinese trade statistics, Chinese exports to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan of 45 dual-use goods targeted by sanctions have risen 64 percent from pre-2022 levels; many have ultimately been tracked to Russia. In 2023, for example, Kazakhstan purchased $5.9 million in uncrewed aircraft from China and exported $2.7 million to Russia.
Post-Soviet legal architectures such as the EAEU have also enabled Russian businesses to relocate while obscuring their origins. Over 4,000 Russian-owned companies were registered in Kazakhstan alone the first nine months of 2022, driving an 18 percent increase in the country’s total foreign investment. Around half a million Russian citizens have opened bank accounts in Kazakhstan since February 2022. Informal connections between EAEU customs officials, trading companies, and logistics operators facilitate a great deal of so-called false transit, the deliberate misrepresentation of shipments’ true destination in Russia.
Post-Soviet states have proved vital to Russia’s economic adjustment to sanctions. And the arrangement has proven mutually beneficial, as Central Asia has maintained the highest growth rates in the European and Central Asia region: the World Bank projects that Central Asia’s growth rate reached 4.3 percent in 2024 and will reach five percent in 2025.
MIXED MESSAGES
Politically, most elites in post-Soviet countries have been careful not to condemn Moscow’s aggression even as they defend the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law. But political attitudes toward Russia’s war in Ukraine are varied, complex, and shaped by pressing domestic challenges. In Georgia, for instance, the public remains broadly supportive of Ukraine. The government, however—which the country’s opposition has accused of falsifying results in October 2024’s parliamentary election—has moved closer to Moscow and broke with Kyiv in February to join the United States in sponsoring a UN resolution on the war that significantly toned down criticism of Russia at the behest of a new Trump administration. In Armenia, the inverse appears to be happening: although the Armenian public’s economic links with Russia continue to expand, the government of Nikol Pashinyan publicly declared in 2024 that it was not Russia’s ally in the Ukraine war. Armenia has since suspended its participation in activities by the CSTO and evicted Russian border guard troops from the Yerevan airport.
Polling in Central Asia by the survey firm Central Asian Barometer, meanwhile, reveals that public opinion about whether Russia, Ukraine, or the United States is most to blame for the war remains fairly evenly divided in Kazakhstan; in Kyrgyzstan, more respondents blame Ukraine or the United States than Russia for the outbreak of conflict. Overall, Central Asian publics appear to be more concerned about the war’s negative impact on their economies than about the risk of new conflicts erupting. Tellingly, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and over half in Uzbekistan, watch Russian media or entertainment.
Since the war in Ukraine began, Russia has also accelerated its efforts to shape politics in post-Soviet states in its own image, particularly in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan had managed to defer or repel past attempts by Moscow to secure the adoption of a Russian-style foreign agent law. But after a visit to Moscow in April 2024, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov signed legislation that mimicked Russia’s law, imposing stringent auditing and reporting on organizations receiving funding from abroad. The Georgian government’s introduction of similar legislation drew public protests, but the law passed in May, exacerbating tensions with the EU—which halted the country’s accession negotiations—and the United States, which imposed temporary visa restrictions on Georgian officials.
Russia has accommodated China’s growing footprint in Central Asia.
Moscow, however, has not been free to act exactly as it pleases within its former colonies. Weakened by sanctions and a draining war effort, Russia has had to make concessions to regional partners that it views as preferable to Western actors. In the Caucasus, Russia is cooperating more closely with Ankara. Turkey has become a hub for Russian economic activity and energy trading, and Moscow accepted Ankara’s mediation in negotiating the 2022 deal that established a safe corridor for Ukrainian grain exports. Most significantly, Russia remained completely passive when Turkish-supplied Azerbaijani forces seized the province of Nagorno-Karabakh in October 2023. After the downing of an Azerbaijani civilian airplane en route to Grozny, the Chechen regional capital, in December 2024—reportedly by Russian missiles—Putin even offered a rare public apology to the Azerbaijani president. A peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or even Armenia and Turkey, would risk cutting Russia out of the region altogether.
To the east, Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine has led it to accommodate China’s growing economic and security footprint in Central Asia under the shared banner of countering U.S. hegemony. Although both countries supported Washington’s exit from Afghanistan and each views Central Asia as a region vital to its security interests, China is now the region’s largest trading partner and is forging ahead with its own bilateral security initiatives. It is doing so by expanding its formal regional security presence, especially in Tajikistan, deploying more private security forces to protect its regional Belt and Road projects and establishing the China–Central Asia Mechanism, a Russia-free forum for promoting regional cooperation. Moscow may be concerned about some of these trends, but it also believes that it has reached an accommodation with China in Central Asia, despite speculation that the two powers would compete more intensely for regional influence. Moscow publicly acquiesces to these Chinese initiatives because it regards Beijing as its most important backer on Ukraine and strategic partner against the West.
ALTERED STATES
Despite this deference, Russia’s regional influence in post-Soviet states has proved far more resilient than many Western observers anticipated. Three years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow’s strategy to pursue a war of attrition and wait for Western unity to crack appears to be vindicated. U.S. President Donald Trump’s softer stance on Russia has been welcomed by most countries in Russia’s region, which want to avoid being caught in a geopolitical tug of war between Washington and Moscow or, for that matter, Washington and Beijing.
Western policymakers have regularly supported the right of post-Soviet states to make sovereign choices and have pushed for isolating Russia. What they have been less attuned to is the way that Russia, over three decades, has cultivated networks of people, security ties, legal architecture, and supply chains that, in a time of crisis, many post-Soviet governments have shown considerable agency in repurposing for their own political and economic benefit. The post-Soviet region is not turning out to be a decolonizing space; it rather has emerged as a laboratory for new forms of integration and regional networking.
But Western policymakers should not view these developments as zero sum. Instead, they should support these states in their bids to develop meaningful partnerships beyond Moscow and Beijing without forcing them to completely align with the West. Doing so would offer these countries both a geopolitical hedge and breathing room to navigate the shock waves from Russia’s war in Ukraine and the uncertainties surrounding its resolution. Recognizing the evolving influence of post-Soviet legacies is not a concession to Moscow but a necessary step toward crafting pragmatic policies that support regional states’ agency and strategic autonomy.
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