“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Kremlin politics may be as opaque today as in 1939, but the existential problems the regime confronts are not difficult to discern. This was true before February 24, 2022, and it is true today, but we can now begin to consider how Russia’s attempted conquest (or reconquest) of Ukraine might fit into that larger picture. It’s not only about NATO expansion or offended pride. Arguably, both situations have been made worse for Russia, at least in the near term. The same will almost certainly be true of the war’s effects on Russia’s domestic challenges: demographic decline, brain drain, economic stagnation, the solipsism of a personalist regime. These issues are discussed in the articles gathered in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review, all of which were written before the 2022 invasion but (with one exception) after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and backing of Donbas separatists.
The longer-term course of events is beyond our ken, but the impact of the war on Russia’s demographic problems is unlikely to be unambiguously positive under any scenario other than the Kremlin’s initial best case of an easy decapitation and Ukrainian surrender to an army of liberators. Surely, the heavy losses of young men’s lives on both sides of the ongoing conflict will depress birth rates. The actual status of well over a million Ukrainian citizens transported to the Russian interior as well as those in occupied territory who are required to accept Russian identity documents or be excluded from aid distributions, will not be known for a very long time. However, the intention of adding those people, including hundreds of thousands of children, to the Russian population seems clear enough.
The severe sanctions regime and export controls that cut off access to advanced technologies, services, replacement parts, investors, and markets will compound Russia’s economic problems and motivate an ongoing brain drain, at least in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, some Russian hawks have argued that the enlargement of Russia’s control over fuel and food supplies (including Ukrainian grain) for which there is global demand affords Russia tremendous leverage and will ultimately make the country more secure, even invulnerable, with a more quiescent population once the disloyal have either fled or been silenced.
On the issue of NATO expansion, the picture is again mixed. The surprise decision of Sweden and Finland to join the Western defense pact in response to Russia’s aggressive posture deepens the security of the entire Baltic region as it fortifies NATO. On the other hand, the possibility of Ukraine’s defeat and even dismemberment complicates the security status of the countries along Ukraine’s western border and the Black Sea littoral. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is obviously reassessing his room for maneuver as gatekeeper between East and West, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Viktor Orban has explained Hungary’s neutrality on the war as the best way to safeguard the over-the-border Hungarian-speaking population in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian oblast, though without voicing irredentist expectations. It has long been reported that East European states have standing offers of Ukrainian territory from Vladimir Putin; the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky even drew up a tempting menu of border regions. More recently, Dmitry Medvedev distributed a map of Ukraine that resembled a butcher’s poster of beef cuts, now labeled Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, with only a small pocket around Kiev remaining as Ukraine There is little reason to doubt that the price for accepting a share of Ukraine—in addition to taking responsibility for occupying and securing that territory and welcoming Russia to the neighborhood—would be withdrawal from NATO. At the moment, that would seem to be a risky bet.
Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal—complementing Xi Jinping’s and, for that matter, Donald Trump’s—is to reshape the international system based on liberal democratic norms that was established under US leadership in the wake of the Second World War, expanded after the collapse of the USSR, and entered a period of accelerating decay since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2007 financial crisis. On February 26, 2022, Russia’s official news agency posted (and then quickly deleted) a prescheduled release titled “The New World Order,” celebrating the presumed takeover of Ukraine as a fait accompli. The article laid out the goals of the “military operation” as follows: Ukraine would be returned to “its natural state as part of the Russian world,” with Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine once more forming a single geopolitical whole; Europe would finally recognize that the Anglo-Saxon world had been driving confrontation with Russia in service to its own interest in thwarting European autonomy; Russia would demonstrate that the era of Western global domination was giving way to the reality of a multipolar world, while on the home front, a new era was beginning “both in ideology and in the very model of our socio-economic system.”
Since that time, several more official and semi-official statements of purpose—some quite blood-curdling and frankly genocidal—have appeared, but none more ambitious than the vision described by Russian foreign policy expert Sergei Karaganov in a June 2022 interview with the Italian geopolitical monthly Limes. When asked, “What is your grand strategy?” Karaganov replied: “We will be able to fix our Western security border. We’ll become, of course, more dependent on China and the East. But in 10 years there will be a different world and a different Europe, and we will start to build what I call a Greater Eurasia, that is, a Commonwealth of countries from Shanghai to Lisbon … ” Failing some form of Russian victory, Karaganov said, he could foresee only catastrophic scenarios: a fracturing of the Russian Federation, intensification of the authoritarian regime, escalation of the conflict to additional venues and even nuclear warfare. “But,” he noted, “defeat is unthinkable. … We need victory.”