Thomas de Waal and Fiona Hill discuss Russia’s changing status in its neighboring countries and the factors shaping their relationship with Moscow—and the West.
Putin’s war against Ukraine has prompted states in Russia’s neighborhood to reconsider their affinity to Moscow.
Thomas de Waal, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, and Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, reflect on the future political direction of these countries.
[00:00:00] Intro, [00:01:44] Russia’s Changing Relations With Its Neighbors, [00:12:08] Putin’s Goals in Russia’s Neighborhood, [00:22:09] The Future Political Trajectories of Russia’s Neighbors.
Fiona Hill, December 12, 2023, “‘We’ll Be at Each Others’ Throats’: Fiona Hill on What Happens If Putin Wins,” Q&A with Maura Reynolds, Politico.
Fiona Hill, Samuel Charap, and Andriy Zagorodnyuk, July 27, 2023, “How Does the War in Ukraine End?”, The Foreign Affairs Interview Podcast, Foreign Affairs.
Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, August 25, 2022, “The World Putin Wants: How Distortions About the Past Feed Illusions About the Future,” Foreign Affairs.
Fiona Hill, February 28, 2022, “‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes,” Q&A with Maura Reynolds, Politico.
Fiona Hill, October 2021, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century,” Mariner Books.
Fiona Hill, September 12, 2016, “Putin: The One-Man Show the West Doesn’t Understand,” Taylor & Francis Online.
Thomas de Waal, February 13, 2024, “In the Caucasus, Another Year of War or Peace,” Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal, September 26, 2023, “The EU and Azerbaijan: Time to Talk Tough” Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal, September 22, 2023, “A Tragic Endgame in Karabakh,” Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal, August 31, 2023, “The Orbanizing of Georgia,” Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal, May 11, 2023, “Time to Get Serious About Moldova,” Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal, January 25, 2023, “Russian weakness challenges EU to ease tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Financial Times.
Thomas de Waal
Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused turmoil all around its borders. From Moldova to Tajikistan, governments have drawn the conclusion that Russia is unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
It’s the end of an idea that’s been around for thirty years, since the end of the Soviet Union: the “Near Abroad.” That’s the concept that the post-Soviet states around Russia form a region where Russia has special rights and privileges.
But if we know what is ending, it’s far less clear what happens next… These countries’ relationship with Russia is definitely changing but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are turning West. So, what does the future hold for Russia’s neighbors? And does Europe have any interests and influence in these states?
Thomas de Waal
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Europe Inside Out, Carnegie Europe’s monthly podcast about the continent’s greatest foreign policy challenges.
My name is Tom de Waal and I am a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.
Thomas de Waal
This episode of Europe Inside Out is about the neighborhoods around Russia that are also neighborhoods of other countries, namely China, Turkey, and the European Union. It's the theme of a new paper I've written for Carnegie Europe and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
I'm glad to say I'm joined by Fiona Hill, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and I’d say one of the best experts on Russia in the Western world. Fiona, welcome.
Fiona Hill
Thanks so much, Tom.
Thomas de Waal
So we're talking about what used to be called the Near Abroad. I guess I would say that concept is ending, with the war in Ukraine. But I would guess you would agree that this action process has been going on for thirty years.
Fiona Hill
Yes, I mean, that's absolutely the case, Tom, and nothing is ever static. And the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, as we call it, was also a long process of unraveling of various ties and economic and political frames the Soviet Union was operating in.
And if we think back to how the immediate aftermath in 1991, in fact, the whole process in which the Soviet Union was dissolved, it was the result of an agreement among three of the leaders of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine to forge a different entity. And they created the Commonwealth of Independent States and then tried to push for every other former republic to join that. And, of course, just within a matter of years, many of the republics, including the constituent republics of Ukraine and Belarus, had looked for the exits and were looking to create other arrangements. And the Commonwealth of Independent States starts looking more and more like the British Commonwealth in terms of mechanisms for divorce and maybe kind of keeping countries loosely together for not just cultural and sporting terms. I mean, obviously Russia had bigger ambitions of this, but it looked like a lot of the other countries did not. And the countries that tended to stay closer to Russia were those that had very sharp dependencies. Either economic dependencies in the case of the Central Asian republics or countries that were in dire security straits, including Armenia, for example, which was in the midst of a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh with Azerbaijan almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So as you said, this is a process. The original framing of keeping the band together, so to speak, you know. Didn't work for all of the countries. And in fact, what we've been talking about for the last thirty years is all of the efforts of all of the former Soviet republics to go their own way and Russia trying to figure out how to keep them in its orbit by one way or another.
Thomas de Waal
One of Russia's pitches was to be the security umbrella. In 2002, I think Russia formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization. It's a kind of answer to NATO. And what strikes me since the invasion of Ukraine is that we're seeing Russia not acting as a security patron. It’s obviously operating as a hard security actor in Ukraine. But Russia didn't intervene to help Armenia when Azerbaijan came across the border. It didn't intervene, actually, in Central Asia in a border dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. So it's a kind of paradox here that although its pitch is to be the big kind of security patron, it's actually in some ways leaving a security vacuum around it.
Fiona Hill
I think that's right, Tom, and I think we could probably say similar things on economic efforts as well. Russia tries to create a Eurasian Economic Union as a kind of counterpart to the EU. And I think you see here a pattern of kind of mirror imaging of Western entities and not from just NATO. I mean, you said the CSTO was meant to be the counterpart for NATO. And really what Russia is doing here is kind of thinking: well, look, the West has still kept all of their institutional arrangements in the Cold War, is building on them, trying to attract former Soviet republics and so the Eastern bloc countries into these entities. You have the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, etcetera, going off into NATO, also similarly joining the European Union. And there's a kind of competitive element to this. And it's really centered around Russia maintaining its sphere of influence and its dominance and its ability to pull closer all of the former republics. So it's more about Russia's thinking about its own security. It's not really collective. It's not, certainly, mutual defense. And we see this over and over again. I'm sure you could come up with lots of other examples of where this really doesn't work.
Russia is also demanding the rights, in the case of many of the CSTO members, I mean, Armenia in particular, to have bases there on their territory and also to be in charge of their borders, the security of their borders, their border guards. And Armenia is in the process, as you've been writing about, of unraveling all of this at the moment because Armenia has come to the conclusion after these thirty years, just as you pointed out by the fact that Russia did not help Armenia in its final struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh with Azerbaijan, that Russia is doing absolutely nothing for its security and that maybe it needs to be looking elsewhere. And the same comes out in the economics. It seems to be more about Russia maintaining unequal economic relationships with former members of the Soviet Union that are now satellite economies for migrant labor. I mean, they get remittances, but it's not really kind of for the mutual benefit and prosperity for other members of the economic union from the viewpoint of many of the other states. And Kazakhstan is a case in point; that Kazakhs suggested initially under President Nazarbaev the creation of this Eurasian Economic Union, thinking that it would kind of enhance all of the economic interactions that would operate much more—not quite like the European Union, I don't think they really had those aspirations or even desires for that, but that it would be a preferred trading arrangement, not unequal and that they would be able to actually push the Russians to think more about their own economies and growth. And of course it didn't turn out like that at all. And then there was a great desire to rush for the exits. And that's of course one of the reasons why Ukraine and Russia have clashed because Ukraine didn't want to be part of any of these arrangements.
Thomas de Waal
That's definitely the case, Fiona. But there's also an interesting thing going on. I was in Armenia in January and you see this in Georgia as well, and I think in Kazakhstan, that actually in a rather narrow way the Eurasian Economic Union is now working for these countries because they're not under sanctions, Russia is. And so they're the ideal in-between states for all this re-export going on. And so Armenia is actually doing pretty well economically. It's squeezed in security terms, and you'll have seen the statistics like me, suddenly Kyrgyzstan has imported 600 percent more German cars than it did before the war. And we all know where those cars are actually going. Same is true of the South Caucasus countries. So there's a paradox here. We're kind of happy probably that those countries are booming but they're really skating on thin ice when it comes to some sanctions issues, aren't they?
Fiona Hill
They absolutely are. You know, and this is actually fascinating. I'm really glad you just stressed that because certainly what I was talking about was the past experience of these countries with the Eurasian Economic Union. But now that power has shifted… So this is all about what you're writing about. What we're talking about today is power shifts. And in this regard, the power has shifted in the favor of all of the other former Soviet republics that still have economic relationships and haven't severed ties with Russia because suddenly they’ve become extremely necessary. Also, where are Russians and Russian businesses putting their money? We would have talked many years ago about this bizarre feature of the broader economic system and investment into Russia, where Cyprus looked like it was the number one investor for various periods of time into the Russian economy. Cyprus? That sounds preposterous. Well, it's because all the Russians were living in Cyprus, all the Russian businesspeople, and they were expatriating, in a way, and repatriating assets. So they were worried about punitive action by the state or predation, instead of Russia itself bringing all their investment into Cyprus and then reinvesting it into Russia as foreign direct investment.
And now we're seeing this happen, as you point out, with Central Asian countries, with countries from the Caucasus, where Georgia before was always being subject to punitive sanctions from Russia. We remember in all of the early days of conflicts, especially during the Russian-Georgian war in 2008, the cut-off of vital trade, not just airlines and people-to-people movement and all of the family ties that kept people together after the fall of the Soviet Union across international borders, because it wasn't just Russians living in all of the Caucasus or Central Asia. Elsewhere, there were lots of Georgians, Armenians, and Azeris and others living inside of Russia, but it was also the Georgian water Borjomi, for example, all the Georgian wine, other foodstuffs all cut off, and now Russia wants all of these and that we have these preposterous situations where Norwegian salmon is being repackaged as, let's just say, Kyrgyzstani, I mean, that's not a real example, but there are examples like this. And these countries now have become the staging areas for all of this trade, and they'd be able to play the role of middlemen.
They are the source of all of these goods that they wouldn't normally be, that Russia really wants. So their relationship has changed dramatically. And if you think about a country like Kyrgyzstan, which you pointed out… after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan hit rock bottom. It was one of the poorest countries in the whole region because all of its economy was tailored towards foodstuffs that were sent to Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union. They had to slaughter incredible numbers of sheep and cattle, etcetera. Their agricultural fruits and vegetables all lost markets it took a long time to restore, and now they're becoming an entrepot and a market for other goods coming from elsewhere.
The other thing further afield on this that we should mention is that it's not just the Central Asians or the Caucasus. You've mentioned before the role of Turkey. That's obviously very important in the Caucasus. And of course, Georgia sits right next to Turkey. And we've got all of these changes in relationships with Turkey and Azerbaijan, and talks about opening up borders that will change that whole set of trade, economic, and other patterns.
And then the Central Asian countries and Russia have all kinds of ties with the Gulf states, the Emirates, Dubai, Doha. These are major flight routes now through Istanbul and the Emirates to Russia and also to Central Asia. And you're seeing a whole new pattern, I would argue, and I'm sure you would say the same, that is emerging in economic and trade and people-to-people ties that we would not have seen had it not been for the war in Ukraine, but also that has been developing with this whole thirty years of shifts that you've been talking about.
Thomas de Waal
Well, let's talk a bit about Russia itself. Many, many books will be written about why Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But from the point of the view of the conversation we're having, would you say that maybe what happened really was that all those soft integration projects had failed—that we've talked about, Eurasian Economic Union, in particular, the Commonwealth of Independent States, all of those kind of projects to regather the post-Soviet states—none of them worked. And so, in a sense, the only thing left on the table was hard military power?
Thomas de Waal
Yeah, I think that is definitely a big part of the story. We saw that in the case of Georgia in 2008. And of course, 2022 was merely another stage in Russia's efforts to use hard power against Ukraine that go back to 2014 in the annexation of Crimea. But you could also argue, go back further, that after the so-called color revolutions in Ukraine and elsewhere, Russia starts to worry that the trends are not moving in its direction, because a lot of these are protest movements, grassroots against corruption at the top, but also against elite ties still with Russia, or Russia trying to interfere in domestic politics of different countries. And, you know, we see Russia cutting off Ukraine's gas in 2006 and all kinds of political clashes. So there has been exertion of hard power at different points, or soft power used as hard power as well. All kinds of cultural pressure put on when countries try to move away from having Russian as either the main language or one of the main languages, all of the language laws, as they shift in different countries, they get pressure put upon them as well, through media, and, again, withholding of aid or sanctions against key goods, etcetera. We can trace a lot of these patterns here. So you're absolutely right. There's this kind of buildup of this code, coercive pressure over time. So it actually culminates in what seems probably, from the Kremlin's point of view, a logical next step, which is full-on attempts to invade Ukraine.
But I think it's also because there's a perception that the international environment has changed, become more permissive, because over these thirty years, people have become complacent elsewhere about these trends. And I think you're actually right to warn Russia has not lost the plot, so to speak, and has not lost all of the ties with the former Soviet republics. And although this whole idea of a Near Abroad is changing dramatically, the idea that they're still the former Soviet republics, just as France has taken a long time to change, or to have its perspective change in Africa from the colonial period, in Britain, etcetera, it has been very difficult for Russia to cut the ties. But everywhere else, people have started to think that Russia was on the same trajectory as other former imperial states and that there was just no way that the pressure that Russia was exerting would turn into anything else. And Putin takes advantage of that. And there's almost a kind of a peak moment that happens in that period of, let's just say, 2020 through to the invasion of Ukraine, when there's just massive disarray in the West. There's obviously all the upheaval in the United States and the crisis around the U.S. elections. We're about to do that again here in 2024. You've had January 6, you've had the United States pulling out of Afghanistan, the complete collapse of US interventionist efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan together. You've got Brexit that's finally coming to fruition in, with the United Kingdom and Europe. You've got clashes within the European Union between the French and the Germans and the French and the Brits after Brexit are getting into all these spots over security issues and on and on and on.
Putin can survey the international scene especially in Europe and the United States, and think, ok, these guys are really not paying attention. They don't really care about this region because it's also the failure, frankly, of West, as in Western Europe and the United States, to really develop a foothold there. All of the efforts we saw in the early decades of the 1990s through into the early 2000s to really reorient the region or increase trade and economic, political, and security ties have also failed outside, one would argue, of the Eastern bloc and the Baltic states.
So there's kind of multiple things going on there. And I think Putin feels it's a very permissive environment to use force, and he's always very careful about where he chooses to use force, where he thinks it can be most propitious and to Russia's advantage. Even though, of course, we see it as a disaster. He actually did not think it would be.
Thomas de Waal
So you've written a brilliant biography of Putin. You've met him several times. So that kind of leads us to the question of what he does next, which also leads us to the question of what he actually believes, because Putin is a bit of an unlikely imperialist. The guy who came to power in 1999, this rather colorless ex-KGB guy out of the Yeltsin administration. So, to what extent would you say he's a genuine imperialist who really wants to rebuild Russian Empire 2.0? And to what extent is he just an instrumentalist? He's a guy who wants to stay in power, domestic politics has failed him, this Crimea worked for him, this is just a bigger version of Crimea, picking an existential fight with the West… So to what extent, where would you put the needle on that particular gauge about Putin the imperialist, or versus Putin just the instrumentalist?
Fiona Hill
Well, I think I would perhaps put it in a slightly different way, thinking about the imperial gauge, like the structure of the barometer, it's in fancy, gilded gold and the shape of a Kremlin or some basils or something like this. And then it's the needle moving within this, about where he gets opportunity. And I want to explain this a bit, because you're absolutely right. And our colleague Andrew Weiss has done this great graphic. It's not really a novel, is it? It’s about a real subject, but it's a kind of a graphic non-fiction,“The Accidental Tsar,” touching on exactly all of these issues that Putin bizarrely rises to power and then he is trying to fashion himself, as a tsar because he's taking on all of the accouterments of the state and using Russia's history, we would say, also misusing it and misapplying it. But he's become a Russian history buff, going back into the early stretches of time, creating and fabricating a whole new version of Russian history and placing himself very firmly in the middle of it. And seems at this particular point after the March 2024 election, when he's reanointed with a kind of ridiculously high turnout, it just seems totally preposterous even by where he's been in the past, but is it that his intention is now to be that new tsar, that accidental tsar, and everybody's talking about the fact that he has been in power so long it's already into his twenty-fifth year, that he will have outlasted Joseph Stalin and Catherine the Great. And he himself is talking about this all the time as well.
So there's that frame. He's created that frame in which to operate in ways that his predecessors obviously didn't and couldn't. It's part of that sort of longevity and tenacity that he has. And within that is the instrumentalism, right? He tries to use absolutely everything. So he's kind of got a maximalist frame, but he can't always achieve what he wants to do, but he'll take every opportunity to do so. And he's always spinning narratives and changing narratives. I mean, all of us can trace the changes, whatever suits him, whatever kind of fits the purpose. So it's, you know, I mean, in some respects, that little hand on the gage is always jostling backward and forwards, you know, depending on where he sees the greatest opportunity.
And if he can forge a narrative that Ukraine is Russia, is essential to Russia, which he does all the time. Belarus, by the way—I mean, we rarely speak about Belarus—Belarus's sovereignty, is not just contested, it seems to have completely disappeared, been dissolved inside of Russia at this point, though, it hasn't entirely. But, he's already made an achievement with Belarus that perhaps if you go back to the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, where in fighting Belarus, we had in this fabulous hunting lodge, sometimes described as a hut, where the three leaders of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus came together to dissolve the Soviet Union, we wouldn't have expected Belarus to end up on this track thirty years ago. We might have thought of it in a different direction. And part of that is because he's taken advantage of somebody who is a sort of paler version of himself, Alexander Lukashenko, who would love to be a tsar but can't. And you can't… You don't have the Belarusian mythology to play with but wants to be, basically the authoritarian leader of what's left of his state for here in perpetuity as well, and has made a kind of a deal with the devil with Putin to be a lesser devil.
But you've got other countries where they can draw on their own longstanding history, of Armenia and Georgia, and Azerbaijan has a totally different history as well, and the Central Asian states like Kazakhstan, have spent the last thirty years, particularly under the previous president, Nazarbayev, building up a whole new idea of what the Kazakh state is, that is in opposition to Russia. I mean, it might take Russia as a starting point in the relationships to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but it's kind of moving off in a different direction, why Kazakhstan is different.
So Putin can take advantage where things start to move together in his direction. And Georgia was a case in point. And, Tom, I mean, I hope you'll say a few words about how you think Georgia has shifted, because that is a really dramatic shift. Since the early 2000s, Georgia was always one of the countries, including in the Soviet Union, to try to forge its independence. And we would say now that Georgia, it's not Belarus, but it seems to be trending in that general direction, not in any direction that any of us, I think, would have predicted, even ten years ago.
Thomas de Waal
This is really interesting. We’re also, I guess, looking ahead as we draw to the end of this conversation about where are the weak spots, where is Putin going to take advantage? And I'd say my conclusion is that two things are important here. One is geography. Central Asia is far from the West, it has its own dynamics going on. It's much more about China than it is about the West. The Caucasus is very contested. Moldova probably has the best chance to break free simply because of geography and because it has a big patron in Romania. So that's one typology. But I guess the other thing is regime type really matters here, that these one-party autocracies in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, they know how to deal with Russia. They're also interested in not having regime change. They're good at doing business with Russia. They know where Putin's red lines are. And it's all rather comfortable, as much as anything can be comfortable.
But looking then we look at Armenia and Georgia and this bizarre situation where the nominal Russian ally now has the very pro-Western government, that's Armenia, and they're really trying to signaling that they want to break out of that Russian embrace. And that's going to be incredibly difficult. But basically that break is happening right before us. And then Georgia, I think, is the really puzzling one because it's a kind of hybrid case. It's still a democracy. It's still got an opposition, it's still got civil society organizations, although they're coming under pressure at the moment. And yet it's got these bizarre elites who are simultaneously say they want to join the European Union, they've got candidate status, and yet they're making all of these overtures towards Russia. And the business relationship has obviously really developed since the war. And it's a very, very hard one to gauge. The question really is do they really want to go all the way with Russia or is this just a massive game of playing all sides against one another? And they see actually the good economic relations with Russia as a kind of insurance policy against Russian aggression. I think that's probably what's going on. And I think a lot of the public actually buys into this, when you're in Georgia, just talking to ordinary people in shops and taxis, they buy into the idea that we were attacked in 2008 and this government has kept us out of a war since 2022.
So I think the Georgian Dream government is playing this more cleverly than we perhaps give them credit for. I think they do have a plan. It's not a plan I particularly like watching. Of course, the important thing to watch there is the elections in October, which they're desperate to win.
Fiona Hill
Tom, I was just going to say very quickly, it's very important that what we always might receive through the media, which is obviously quite limited at times here in the United States or Britain or elsewhere, we get just little snippets of things from on the ground. People are not spending the amount of time that you are there. We often just see the surface of things. And we might think that the famous Georgian oligarch who is the power behind Georgian Dream because he made all of his money in Russia might be turning things in that direction. But as you were saying, maybe he's more like leaders in Azerbaijan and Central Asia, for example, who actually have much more of an idea, having spent so much time in Russia, about how to handle this and how to keep them somewhat at bay. And that also fits in a Georgian pattern. Saakashvili was actually an outlier. Before that, we had Shevardnadze, and you had many other in the Georgian elite who were very closely tied into either the Soviet system or the Russian and Moscow system, including businesspeople who had these ideas, Bendukidze, for example, of how they might be able to manage that relationship.
So I think it's important to just make it very clear that we shouldn't always assume that what we're seeing on the surface is what's really happening beneath. And, of course, we've had all of these dramatic changes with so many Russians fleeing Moscow and other big cities and ending up in places like Georgia and Armenia and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to avoid the war. That also creates not just sort of opportunities for business but also other anxieties and vulnerabilities. And so, I mean, all of the countries now that have taken in large numbers of Russians are having to handle that.
There's also the issue of Turkey. And I think that thinking about Turkey as the other, along with Iran as well, all imperial powers that have always jostled with Russia for the Caucasus and all also have their own ties and influences. It's going to be very important how Turkey plays this. And as you pointed out before with Armenia is trying to improve its relationship with Turkey. The Turks have said now that there is no longer as they've always put it in Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh—this is the Turkish view, just to be very clear for people listening here—that there is now no reason, in fact, for Turkey and Armenia to have hostile relations.
But the Turks see Russia and Iran as trying to kind of block the improvement of that relationship. So how Turkey maneuvers itself in the Caucasus, well, including with Georgia, where Turkey has also had very close ties, of course, has an open border, and with Azerbaijan, which conversely has a lot of influence inside of Turkey itself, that becomes important, too. And that's very complicated. And you're one of the people who's helping to guide us through the thicket of all of those relationships.
Thomas de Waal
What I see there is this kind of rather cynical, managed relationship between Russia and Turkey. They disagree on a lot, but they also agree on a lot. And I think Turkey could open the border with Armenia tomorrow. It could lessen Russian influence there massively by doing that. But it’s seeing at the moment, Turkey is seeing an advantage in a lot of dealing with Azerbaijan and with Russia, and it's probably all about transport routes and about sanctions evasion. There's a big economic case to strengthen that relationship to the detriment of Armenia. That's really unfortunate.
And the other thing I would say is Russia and Turkey seem to have a shared agenda to keep the West out of the Caucasus. They're promoting this three platform with Iran, where the foreign ministers meet. And every time they meet there, they say we are the important powers and the West should stay out of it. So that's a bit depressing. But just one final point before we end, as we are looking ahead, any other weak spots do you think we should be looking at where you are talking about—I think that’s a good phrase of yours—Putin taking advantage of other people's weaknesses in the big Russian neighborhood, which is also, of course, lots of other people's neighborhood? Any other weak spots that we should be paying more attention to?
Fiona Hill
Yeah. And I think it's important what you just said about the whole idea of where the three powers of the Caucasus, Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Of course, that's true. It's like back to the past of the old imperial powers making their arrangements of borders and populations that spread over all of the three former imperial territories. But there is some kind of weakness in that past as well, actually, because, of course, Turkey, Russia, and Iran have clashed so many times.
And I think that one of the weakest spots actually is around the Black Sea. The Caspian perhaps somewhat less so, because there was always a kind of a sense of the Parian powers there trying to kind of figure out their relationships. But you've got a lot of, I think, clashing agendas in the Black Sea. I mean you've got, of course, three NATO countries, Turkey, people say nominally, but Turkey takes its NATO relationship seriously. You got Bulgaria, obviously, and Romania, who are very nervous and have got very long historic ties also with Russia, and a lot of sympathy towards Russia in general. In Bulgaria, more so than in Romania, but still, they're kind of used to being part of the old Soviet bloc or having, in the case of Bulgaria and Russia, long historic and linguistic and other cultural ties. But all are very much feeling threatened by war in Ukraine, by the fact that the Black Sea has become so contested. The Turks continue to keep other Russian warships out of the Black Sea, even as Ukraine has managed to pound the Russian Black Sea fleet, and you're seeing a whole shift now of Russia's naval force to the eastern part of the Black Sea and away from Ukraine. And I think that's something we need to keep a close eye on because I'm not sure Turkey's particularly thrilled by all of that. Because now we have this plan, and you probably know more about this, having been in Georgia as recently to build up what was a smaller base in Notchamshir in Abkhazia for Russia. So what if Russia now starts to move towards taking Abkhazia formally? South Ossetia has been on the docket for some time. The Russians again stoking up. We've already seen this in Gagauzia and Transnistria, around Moldova. But if they're really starting to put their attention to the eastern side of the Black Sea as opposed to the Western side as they get pushed away from Crimea, you know, what does that do to some of those regional dynamics?
That's just one area that I would flag. I think there are many others, and you always do a very good job of highlighting those. But I just said the Black Sea has become especially contested in this particular current period.
Thomas de Waal
That's really important. We actually did a Europe's Inside Out podcast about the Black Sea, which was very successful. We have to leave it there. Fiona, a great pleasure to talk to you for this podcast, Europe's Inside Out. Thank you so much for taking the time, and hopefully we can talk again in the future.
Fiona Hill
Thanks, Tom. That would be great. Thank you.
Thomas de Waal
For those who are interested in learning more about Russia’s foreign and neighborhood policy, I encourage you to follow Carnegie Europe’s work. Our X (formerly Twitter) account is @Carnegie_Europe. You can find me @Tom_deWaal. That is @T-O-M-underscore-D-E-W-A-A-L.
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