The West Is Posing New Challenges To Russia Along Its Entire Southern Periphery

The question arises of why Russia’s regional partners are going along with this in the first place.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week that “NATO and the EU are building their own dialogues and interaction frameworks with Central Asia and South Caucasus. I don’t think anyone can see hidden agendas in that except when, as we are now witnessing, the West is seeking to use these ties to pull these countries away from the Russian Federation rather than to establish mutually beneficial cooperation.” This comes ahead of Trump’s meeting with Central Asian leaders in DC next week.

The larger context concerns the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) that the US brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan in August, which is expected to result in NATO-member Turkiye injecting more Western influence into all the states along Russia’s southern periphery. Even if Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev agrees not to allow TRIPP to be used for military purposes amidst his incipient rapprochement with Putin, it’ll still tie those two regions much more closely with the West.

These observations raise the question of why Russia’s regional partners are going along with this. After all, they have agency and could therefore rebuff the West’s outreaches, yet not a single one of them has done so. To the contrary, the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders let the US broker an arguably game-changing deal between them, while their Central Asian counterparts are about to pay pilgrimage there. Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev tried to answer this question for RT in early July:

“Russia knows that solving regional disputes by force is usually against its own interests. But it cannot assume neighbours see Moscow in the same way. Other states inevitably judge Russia by its history, its scale, and its power – and a great power can always be tempted by simple solutions…Russia’s neighbours have open borders in many directions and constant opportunities to hedge their positions. It is only natural they look for friends elsewhere to calm their fears.

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Great powers must understand their neighbours’ fears but not surrender to them. Russia should neither abandon its influence nor expect to be loved for it. Instead, it should manage the consequences of its size and power, and treat neighbourly fear as part of the price of being a giant. That is the task before Russian diplomacy – and a test of its ability to balance strength with responsibility in an ever more unstable world.”

Bordachev is basically acknowledging the limits of Russia’s influence along its entire southern periphery, which are due not only to the perceived fear of it that he touched upon in a nod to the Constructivist school of International Relations, but are also connected to perceptions of the special operation. While it’s veritably impressive that Russia is holding its own in an over 3,5-year-long improvised war of attrition with the West, its regional partners might still perceive it as relatively weakened and newly distracted.

Accordingly, partially driven by the aforesaid fear that they have of Russia, they might have conceivably assessed – whether on their own, through consultations with one another, and/or with the assistance of the West – that a window of opportunity has opened to maximally “hedge their positions.” TRIPP is the logistical means for doing so, which would be complemented by the planned PAKAFUZ railway between “Major Non-NATO Ally” Pakistan and Central Asia if Afghan-Pakistani ties ever improve like Trump wants.

The shared development that Putin proposed during the Second Russia-Central Asia Summit in early October shows that his country recognizes these new challenges and is ready to compete with the West. Nevertheless, it might not suffice for preemptively averting the security threats that could materialize as a result of Turkiye spearheading the spread of Western military influence into this region. Russia’s brightest minds like Bordachev should therefore prioritize the formulation of a supplementary policy.