For three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, governments across Central Asia and the South Caucasus made foreign-policy decisions with one question always in mind: What will Moscow allow? Kazakhstan supplies rare earths to America and tells Vladimir Putin to end his war. Armenia has written EU membership into law and stopped showing up to Russia's military alliance.
Azerbaijan hosts conferences on Russian colonialism and helps build Ukraine's railways. Moscow has found no way to make them start asking again. The war in Ukraine, which has consumed the military and economic resources Russia used to police its periphery, is only part of the explanation.
The deeper problem is how Russia managed these relationships in the first place. Putin relied on coercion: frozen conflicts on their territory, trade embargoes when they strayed, and the standing implication that Russian troops could arrive if matters went far enough. Russia's economic presence was real but built to bind rather than to build—stakes in export pipelines, control of transit routes and power grids, leverage over the migrant labor on which several economies depend.
Russia never became a source of technology, capital or security that made these countries stronger. Influence of that kind requires the capacity to frighten. Ukraine drained the capacity, and little else was holding them.
Kazakhstan illustrates how far things have moved. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Putin, with RT's editor-in-chief present, that Kazakhstan will never recognize Russia's separatist projects, naming Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Luhansk and Donetsk one by one. In July, standing beside Putin at a summit in Omsk, he said the war "has to be stopped." Meanwhile, Kazakhstan and the United States have built exactly the partnership Moscow spent decades blocking: the first country of President Trump's second term to join the Abraham Accords, $7 billion in Boeing orders, billions more in technology partnerships, and a growing role supplying the critical minerals that Washington needs to escape Chinese processing monopolies.
Armenia is more striking still. The Kremlin ran a full-scale campaign to unseat Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the June elections. Documents leaked to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project exposed a Russian program to triple the reach of anti-Pashinyan narratives and expand a network of paid pro-Russian voices, while The Insider traced ties between Russian intelligence and the opposition's businessman backers.
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