Benevolent hegemon, neighborhood bully, or regional security provider? Russia’s efforts to promote regional integration after the 2013–2014 Ukraine crisis

Abstract

Russia has tried to use economic incentives and shared historical and cultural legacies to entice post-Soviet states to join its regional integration efforts. The Ukraine crisis exposed the weaknesses of this strategy, forcing Russia to fall back on coercive means to keep Kiev from moving closer to the West. Having realized the limits of its economic and soft power, will Russia now try to coerce post-Soviet states back into its sphere of influence? Fears of such an outcome overestimate Russia’s ability to use coercion and underestimate post-Soviet states capacity to resist. Rather than emerging as a regional bully, Russia is trying to push Eurasian integration forward by becoming a regional security provider. The article relates these efforts to the larger literature on regional integration and security hierarchies – bridging the two bodies of theory by arguing that regional leaders can use the provision of security to promote economic integration. Despite initial signs of success, we believe that the new strategy will ultimately fail. Eurasian integration will continue to stagnate as long as Russia’s economic and soft power remain weak because Russia will be unable to address the economic and social problems that are at the root of the region’s security problems.

Keywords:

• Russia
• Eurasian Economic Union
• security
• regionalism
• Central Asia
• Ukraine crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The current full members of the CIS are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Ukraine and Turkmenistan are only associate members, as they never officially ratified the CIS founding treaty. Georgia withdrew from the organization in 2009 in the aftermath of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. In 2014, the Ukrainian government announced that it will cut all its ties with the organization and submitted a bill to the Ukrainian parliament to begin the process. However, as of writing, the Ukrainian authorities have not yet made a final decision to leave the CIS.

2. We are indebted to Dmitry Suslov for pointing out the significance of this episode in Russian–Kazakh relations. Suslov (2015).

3. The US also supports authoritarian regimes when it deems it to be in its larger national interests to do so. However, the US criticizes the kind of gross human rights violations that often occur when authoritarian governments repress internal opposition. For example, the US was very vocal in its criticism of Uzbekistan’s government after it massacred protester in Andijan in 2005. This prompted Uzbekistan to back away from the security ties it was developing with the US (forcing the closure of a US airbase) and to increase security cooperation with Russia and China.