RUSSIAN LEADER SUDDENLY SURROUNDED BY INSTABILITY
Regional crises are undermining Putin’s image as tactician
Y E R E VA N, A r m e n i a
In Russia’s self-proclaimed sphere of inf luence, Russia is losing its inf luence.
Concurrent crises in Belarus, Central Asia and the Caucasus region have blindsided the Kremlin, leaving it scrambling to shore up Russian interests in former Soviet republics and undermining President Vladimir Putin’s image as a master tactician on the world stage.
“There is nothing good about these conf licts for Moscow,” Konstantin Zatulin, a senior Russian lawmaker and Putin ally who specializes in relations with what Russians call their “near abroad.”
Putin has spent years building up Russia as a global power, with a hand in hot spots from Latin America to the Middle East, and even meddling in presidential elections in the United States. But after working for years to destabilize the West, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by instability; once seen as sure-handed in foreign affairs, he seems to have lost his touch.
In Belarus, Putin responded to a street uprising in August by propping up the country’s unpopular autocrat, President Alexander Lukashenko, turning public opinion against Russia in what had previously been Europe’s most Russiafriendly country.
In Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, protesters this week appeared on the verge of toppling President Sooron
bai Jeenbekov, less than two weeks after Putin pledged to him in a rare in-person meeting that “we will do everything to support you as the head of state.”
And in the Caucasus, the long-simmering conf lict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh erupted last week into the worst fighting since the 1990s, threatening to undo the balancing act that had allowed Russia to cultivate diverse links to the region.
“Russia was doing all it could to maintain ties both with Azerbaijan and Armenia,” Zatulin said. “Every day of conf lict in Karabakh is, effectively, helping zero out Russia’s authority.”
The spate of new challenges to Russian inf luence strikes at the heart of Putin’s yearslong effort to cast himself as the leader who restored the great-power status that the nation lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even as the Kremlin denied Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian state television gleefully reported on
the American allegations of that interference as a sign that Moscow was being reckoned with again on the world stage.
Now, rather than react decisively to emergencies close to home, Putin sounds ambivalent about Russia’s role.
“We hope the conf lict will end very soon,” he said of Nagorno-Karabakh, in a television interview broadcast Wednesday. Minutes later, referring to Kyrgyzstan, he said, “We hope that everything will be peaceful.”
The conf luence of crises in Russia’s own neighborhood is such that some proKremlin commentators are already accusing the West of an organized campaign to sow discord in the post-Soviet regions.
More balanced analysts, however, have singled out one constant factor in the growing unrest. Both Russia and its neighbors, they say, have been destabilized by the pandemic, which has exposed distrust in institutions and in out-of-touch leaders across the region.
It helped undo the fragile truce between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and in Belarus and in Kyrgyzstan, the disease set the stage for public uprisings by exposing the ruling elite as disconnected from people’s suffering.
Lukashenko angered Belarusians by playing down the danger of the virus, joking that vodka would cure it; in Kyrgyzstan, critics blamed officials for using coronavirus aid money to enrich themselves.
Within Russia, the economic hardship caused by the pandemic has helped deepen public anger against Putin. In the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, for example, thousands of protesters angry over the arrest of a popular governor spilled into the streets last Saturday for the 13th week in a row.
Some analysts say that public discontent within Russia means that Putin needs to turn more of his focus to domestic issues such as economic hardship, pollution and poor health care, rather than delving into global geopolitics. But developments in recent weeks have given Putin more reason to focus on the latter.
“For Putin, practically his entire mission and his vision of Russian greatness and success revolve around his foreign-policy agenda,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research organization focused on politics and policy. The new series of crises, she went on, “will very much distract Putin from domestic problems.”
The centrality of the former Soviet lands to Putin’s foreign policy was evident in the Kremlin’s list of world leaders who called Putin to wish him a happy birthday on Wednesday, when he turned 68. Of the 12 who called, only three leaders — those of Israel, India and Cuba — head countries outside the former Soviet Union.
In Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, some hope for a more forceful stance by Russia in the conflict, which has killed at least 250 people, according to official reports. But Russia’s ability to influence events in the Caucasus now appears limited, despite its past role as a mediator in the NagornoKarabakh conflict. Turkey, Azerbaijan’s most important ally, has taken on a more assertive regional stance.