Some critics of our support for Ukraine argue that that is a regional conflict between two nations and we must always not become involved.
But Vladimir Putin, like Adolf Hitler, is not going to be satisfied with one nation – he wants to dominate Eurasia.
It’s within the interest of the USA to help Ukraine, not to confront the reborn Russian empire later.
From Belarus, which has grow to be a vassal state whose dictator is dependent upon the Russian security apparatus for its political survival, to Serbia, whose president Aleksandar Vucic is Putin’s most credible ally outside the previous Soviet Union, Russia has exploited weak ties for a long time, using military pressure by guiding their political candidates and creating dependencies on Russia to use when Putin is elected.
Belarusian Alyaksandr Lukashenko, while trying to keep his distance between himself and Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, is a pawn of Putin, recently conducting negotiations in Beijing on Moscow’s instructions.
Not surprisingly, Russian aid played a key role in suppressing mass protests following his election in the summertime of 2020, which were almost universally perceived as fraudulent.
Meanwhile, in Georgia and Moldova, the Russian military presence has sustained false separatist republics that challenge the sovereignty of the governments in Tbilisi and Chisinau.
![Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka is a staunch supporter of Putin.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007374384.jpg?w=1024)
In Georgia, the ruling party of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who himself does business in Russia, follows the Kremlin’s orders.
Moldova can have recently expelled two Russian “tourists” plotting a coup, however the Russian-sponsored Shor Party succeeded in overthrowing the professional-Western government, plunging the delicate country into political instability.
Additionally it is in Russia’s interest to destabilize the Western Balkans and keep them as distant from the West as possible – aided, in fact, by Europeans’ reluctance to take the EU’s enlargement to the East seriously, which has confined the region’s “candidate countries” to an indefinite state of limbo. In 2016, the Russians organized but didn’t perform a coup d’état in Montenegro to prevent the country’s possible accession to NATO.
New Russian Empire
At the same time as the invasion of Ukraine drags on, Russian President Vladimir Putin is destabilizing neighboring governments in hopes of constructing a new empire – or at the very least having a buffer zone of allied states.
![Putin is destabilizing other neighboring countries during the war in Ukraine.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ukraineMAP-Russia-article.jpg?w=1024)
BELARUS
Though Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is a staunch ally of Putin, Russia wants more. An internal document leaked from Moscow calls for the creation of a Union State of Russia and Belarus no later than 2030 by way of a “referendum”, not an invasion.
MOLDOVA
Russia already considers the Transnistrian region within the east to be separatist, and Moldova recently expelled two foreigners suspected of plotting a coup d’état.
SERBIA
Russia has pressured its long-time ally to support an invasion of Ukraine, but there have been rifts recently, with Serbia refusing to supply Putin with arms and tightening diplomatic ties with Europe.
GEORGIA
Russia has troops stationed within the “breakaway republics” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which occupy a fifth of Georgia’s territory. Georgian officials fear that Russia will try to expand these holdings or destabilize the federal government.
ARMENIA
Russia has supported the country in its war with neighboring Azerbaijan and expects its loyalty in the longer term.
KAZAKHSTAN, KYRGISTAN, TURKMENISTAN, TAJIKISTAN
Even after the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia exercised control over these Central Asian nations, which were mainly ruled by powerful oligarchs allied with Moscow. Last 12 months, Putin helped quell a revolution in Kazakhstan and intends to keep close allies in power.
In Serbia, Russians find sympathetic interlocutors similarly shaken by the lack of their mini-empire within the Nineties, for which they blame the USA and NATO.
Then there’s Armenia, a nation of lower than 3 million individuals with a protracted conflict with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
While Moscow has done little recently to uphold its end of the discount, Armenia is an element of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a NATO-like pact arrange by Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and continues to seek solutions in Moscow.
![Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic recently strengthened ties with the European Union.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006654483.jpg?w=1024)
Putin can be putting pressure on the “states” – the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, wedged uncomfortably between the spheres of influence of Russia and China.
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev apparently disagrees with the deal, saying he is “concerned concerning the growing rivalry and the rhetoric of nuclear states” in his address to the UN General Assembly in September.
By not joining the Western sanctions against Russia, the federal government in Astana also pledged not to violate the sanctions regime.
Nonetheless, Kazakhstan has a large Russian-speaking minority and shares the second-longest continuous land border on this planet with Russia (behind the USA and Canada), making it extremely vulnerable to Russian aggression.
No wonder that, together with Armenia and Turkey, Kazakhstan has grow to be a key transit country through which coveted Western goods, from luxury items to crisps, reach the Russian market, thus bypassing US and European sanctions.
There may be a common theme across all these vast countries: the dearth of Western alternatives to Moscow’s (and in some cases, Beijing’s) influence.
Except security cooperation with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan throughout the War on Terror, when each countries hosted US military bases, Central Asia has not been high on the agenda of any US administration in living memory.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent stop in Kazakhstan on his way to the G20 meetings in India deserves praise, nevertheless it takes rather more than just diplomacy to make any of the countries within the region a reliable partner.
The identical is true elsewhere. The EU has been grossly negligent in failing to provide a credible path of economic and political integration to countries within the Balkans, Georgia, Moldova – and even Ukraine itself for a very long time.
The atrocities Russia unleashed last 12 months is a possibility to right this collective failure of the Western alliance and bring a few of these misguided countries back into the fold.
Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.