Will Putin’s Empire Strike Out?

In the fall of 1991, as republics from Armenia to Ukraine were declaring independence from the Soviet empire, an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev tried to persuade him to adopt the approach of his rival Boris Yeltsin, president of what was still called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic: Let them go. “Once Russia revives, they will come back,” the adviser wrote in a memo. Yeltsin assumed it would take 20 years to rebuild Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. So, 27 years later and with elections looming in two of the 15 ex-Soviet republics—Moldova and Ukraine—is Russia winning?

The answer has important geopolitical implications. If there’s one thing hawks in Washington and Moscow can agree on, it’s that without an economic and security zone that to some degree matches the territories of both the Soviet and czarist empires, Russia—an energy and nuclear superpower built on weak demographic underpinnings—will struggle to compete in a new multipolar world order with its main rivals: China, the U.S., and the European Union.