Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

Taken together, Russia, the Central Asians and the In-Betweens formed a unique post-imperial landscape. Unlike the lost overseas empires of Britain and France or the exploded empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, in this case the former empire is arrayed around the ex-metropole physically. Russia’s central location gives it immense advantages in dealing with its neighbours. Centrality also begets a sense of vulnerability. A regime change in Pakistan or a shift in Australian foreign policy would have limited direct consequences for the UK. The same cannot be said about Georgia or Kazakhstan from the Kremlin vantage point, gazing out from the Moscow hub to spokes and rim. It can be no mystery why Russia, from Yeltsin onwards, has assiduously identified itself as having ‘vital interests’ in its post-Soviet Eurasian environs.

Using the standard measurements, the prerequisites of national power in post-Soviet Eurasia are more asymmetrically distributed than in any comparable global region other than the Americas.[49] Consider the raw facts about population magnitude and economic strength. In 2015, the ratio of Russia’s population to that of its neighbours ranged from about three to one (for Ukraine) to more than 50 to one (for Armenia). In 2013 economic output, the range is much greater, from a ratio of ten to one (for Kazakhstan) to countries producing a fraction of 1% of Russia’s output (Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan).

The legacy of Soviet planning augmented Russia’s latent centripetal power. Gosplan (the economic-planning agency) had strewn production assets about Soviet territory with no regard for republic borders; without some degree of reintegration, or major alternative sources of growth, individual states would be stuck with a surfeit of inefficiencies. In a prescient paper written in the late 1990s, David A. Lake argued that it would be a mistake to assume that the demise of the USSR would be followed by an age of equality and disconnectedness between the neo-states:

The high level of relationally specific assets between the successor states, which remain as a residue of the old empire, will create important and voluntary pressures to rebuild some degree of economic and political hierarchy in the region…. Relations in the region will not look like those between autonomous, sovereign, ‘Westphalian’ states that characterize much of international politics. Rather, we are likely to find a range of relations, varying from protectorates to informal empires to empires and confederations.[50]

Given the power asymmetries, there would be only one candidate for originator and coordinator of a programme of partial reintegration – Russia.