Putin’s second coming

By Alexei Vlasov, exclusively to VK

The inauguration of Russia’s new President, Vladimir Putin, is due to take place soon; however, experts still can’t agree on what priorities in the sphere of foreign politics the president will establish. Will it be Transdniestria, or Nagorno-Karabakh, or the Eurasian integration project? And will Russia be able to protect its interests in all these areas and in the field of energy trade, as well using the so called ‘soft power’, despite the fact that Western experts doubt the country’s potential as far as the foreign politics is concerned?

If during his first turn Putin had wonderful helpers – oil and gas - in his foreign political endeavors, this time it might turn out that carbon resources won’t be enough  to maintain what remains of Russia’s influence in the countries that Putin himself called ‘the zone of Russia’s interests.

So what stands in Russia’s way? Some experts say that the main obstacle is the lack of a clear and accurate general strategy. According to the exponents of this theory, such a strategy could help us resolve even the most sensitive problems of the post-Soviet space, such as the protection of Russian-speaking residents of the post-Soviet countries and preservation of Russian language as the main means of international communication within the CIS. Other experts deem that the main problem of Russia (and not only in our policy towards the ex-Soviet states, but in our relations with other world’s powers as well) is that its ambitions are far too greater that its actual capabilities. Moreover, Russia is trying to blame its failures in the Central Asian and the South Caucasian regions on the ‘negative interference’ of the external players only to free itself from the responsibility.

For example a system in which all governmental establishments work not to strengthen the state’s positions abroad but to fulfill their own agendas and to make their rivals from a neighboring bureau look bad seems quite absurd. We thought this situation was a matter of history after the 2004 events in Abkhazia, but now it turns out that something similar was happening to Russia’s policy towards South Ossetia in 2011.

This polycentrism of the decision making system is undoubtedly harmful to Russia’s foreign policy, but it is much more disastrous to our Eurasian integration project, which is advertised as the main project of Putin’s new presidency. Despite this optimistic propaganda, the recent EuAsEC summit that took place in Moscow clearly demonstrated that there will be no easy and quick success in this field. It turned out that it’s not so easy to reconcile the positions of Astana, Moscow and Minsk.

Acting on impulse won’t help here. Unfortunately, instead of providing an adequate informational support to this Eurasian ‘project of the century’, the government is creating countless parties and assembles and movements which are, probably, useful for some purposes, but have no actual relation to the main goal of the project – the economic integration. So it turn out that the ‘Eurasian integration’ creates more problems than benefits for now, especially as far as the big and medium-sized enterprises are concerned. But it isn’t enough to bring out the problems. We should also try to suggest a positive strategy.

To be continued.