“Putin’s goals do not stop in Kiev,” said the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, alluding to Russia’s possible future military actions. What other nations are at risk after the invasion of Ukraine? Here is a reasoned map of the Kremlin’s potential targets.
In his twenty-one years in power, has Putin only invaded Ukraine?
No. To begin with, it invaded an autonomous region within Russia, Chechnya, in a brutal war that razed the capital Grozny to the ground and installed a loyal loyalist in power after years of bloody conflict. A kind of dress rehearsal for what was to come next in Georgia.
Was Georgia part of the USSR?
Yes. Located in the Caucasus, bordering Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Black Sea, this country of 4 million inhabitants became independent in 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, like the other fourteen Soviet republics. It had a long period of instability, which the former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, one of the closest collaborators of Mikhail Gorbachev in the years of perestroika in the USSR, who was of Georgian origin and was president, tried to put an end to. of Georgia from 1995 to 2003. But its worst crisis came in 2008 with the war against Russia.
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Why did the war break out?
Because the new Georgian leader Mikheil Sakhashvili has taken an increasingly pro-Western course in a similar way to what has now happened in Ukraine, envisaging a future accession of Georgia to the European Union and NATO. At that point Putin decided to intervene.
Come?
Two regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, inhabited mainly by Russians, had already proclaimed autonomy in ’91 causing a war with the central government of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. In 2008 with a series of provocations, pretexts and “false flag operations”, Russia intervened more directly in the two conflicts, recognized the two regions as independent republics and invaded a large area of Georgia with its troops. A ceasefire subsequently led to the withdrawal of Russian forces, but South Ossetia and Abkhazia have since been de facto under Moscow control. A story very similar to what happened in 2014 in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Longask in Ukraine.
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And now Georgia risks ending up like Ukraine?
There will not necessarily be a need for a Russian invasion: the attack on Ukraine is a sufficient warning. Furthermore, Georgia is much smaller than Ukraine and has a tenth of its population, so a Russian invasion could quickly conquer the capital, even though the high Caucasus Mountains would probably be more difficult to conquer altogether. The fact remains that the current Georgian government, theoretically still willing to run for entry into the EU at least, will be held back by the example of what is happening in Kiev.
How did the West react to the Russian invasion of Georgia?
With faint protests. There was even an EU report which stated that it was unable to ascertain how the war broke out. Mediated by the France of the then president Sarkozy, the ceasefire effectively recognized Moscow’s rights over the two breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With hindsight it can be said that the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 provided Putin with the test bed for the annexation of Crimea and support for Donetsk and Lugansk separatism in 2014 in Ukraine.
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Is Moldova in a similar situation?
Yes. The smallest of the fifteen former Soviet republics, with 3.5 million inhabitants, has already lost its easternmost region since ’91, which has declared itself an independent republic of Transnistria (an expression which means “beyond the Dnestr river), with a population of half a million people of Russian ethnicity and language. The sporadic conflict with Moldova, whose population is mostly Romanian language and ethnicity, has now given way to a de facto state, with Transnistria which is a state not recognized by the UN and which has asked to enter since 2014. to be part of Russia. Like Ukraine and Georgia, any aspiration of Moldova to closer relations with the West risks a rekindling of the war and an invasion of the forces of Moscow.
Of the fifteen republics of the USSR, three were Slavs: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Isn’t the latter in danger of being invaded by Russia itself?
No, because in substance it has already happened. To stay in power after the 2020 scam elections, Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko, in power in Minsk since 1994, enlisted the help of Putin, who provided political support and troops, helping to quell the popular uprising. Since then Lukashenko has been increasingly linked to Russia, which also invaded Ukraine from Belarus in recent days. The Minsk government then announced that Russian forces will remain stationed in Belarus permanently. France has signaled the possibility of Russia installing nuclear weapons in Belarus. In the future, Putin may try to replace Lukashenko, with whom he has not always had good relations in the past, with a more loyal leader in the Kremlin. In Moscow there has often been talk of the hypothesis of annexing Belarus or at least of uniting it with Russia through a confederation. In fact, if the invasion of Ukraine is completed, the three former Slavic republics of the USSR, namely Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, have already reunited.
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But has Russia also recently intervened in Kazakhstan?
Yes. Between late last year and early 2022, Russian forces entered Kazakhstan at the request of the Kazakh government to crack down on widespread popular protests against the local autocratic regime. Between purges and control of strategic infrastructures, Russia has restored order. Rich in oil and with a large minority of the Russian-speaking population, Kazakhstan is now increasingly into the orbit of the Kremlin.
What about the other former Soviet Central Asian republics?
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan are governed, like Kazakhstan, by autocratic regimes that prevented the development of democratic freedoms after the end of the USSR: in practice, the clans that led them in the communist era maintained power even afterwards. Even in this vast region, sandwiched between Russia, China and Afghanistan, the example of the Russian intervention in Kazakhstan and Ukraine will be a warning to maintain good relations with Moscow.
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On what other ex-Soviet republics can Russia’s influence be pushed?
On two other countries in the Caucasus, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The conflict between these two peoples has lasted since the times of the USSR, due to the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, located in Azerbaijan but mainly inhabited by Armenians. The latest spark of this war that has been going on intermittently for a quarter of a century dates back to 2020 and ended with a Moscow-mediated truce. In the dispute, Russia supports Armenia and Turkey supports Azerbaijan. Armenia’s dependence on Moscow is growing stronger.
But didn’t the three Baltic countries also belong to the USSR?
Yes, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were also part of the Soviet Union, but only from 1945 to 1991. Occupied during the Second World War first by the Nazis, then by the Soviet Red Army, these three small countries lost their independence after the conflict and regained it only in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR, after bloody uprisings in the last year of the USSR’s existence which were forcibly repressed by Moscow. The difference from the rest of the USSR is twofold. First, the three Baltic countries have not been part of the USSR since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but only from 1945 onwards. Second, after the collapse of the USSR, in 2004 they joined the European Union and NATO.
Joining the Atlantic Alliance gives them greater protection from a possible Russian invasion, because every attack on a NATO country is an attack on the whole of NATO. But Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians are by no means calm. All three have a Russian minority that has felt discriminated against in the past and that could ask for Moscow’s intervention in its defense, exactly as happened in the Crimea and Donbass (the Donetsk and Lugansk region) in Ukraine. For this reason, NATO has sent troops to the Baltic in recent days, strengthening its defenses, for now with the aim of deterring Russia. It is clear that, unlike Ukraine, a Russian attack in the Baltic would create the conditions for a direct conflict between NATO and Moscow, with the risk of the use of not only conventional weapons.
But hasn’t NATO sent forces to Poland and Romania in recent days?
Yes. Although Russia makes no claims against the two countries that were part of the Soviet sphere of influence before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, they both border on the former USSR and there is the fear that the war in Ukraine will somehow cross their borders. For this reason, NATO has sent soldiers and airplanes to the region, again for the purpose of deterrence.
Who else risks the paws of the Russian bear?
Finland and Sweden. The two Scandinavian countries belong to the European Union, but not to NATO. In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both are raising voices to ask to join the Atlantic Alliance. In recent days, the Swedish and Finnish premieres attended a NATO summit to discuss what to do in the face of the Russian attack in Ukraine. The reaction of the Russian Foreign Ministry came immediately: “If Finland and Sweden were to apply to join NATO, there would be a response from us.”
A spokesperson stressed that, as members of the OECD (the Organization for European Cooperation and Security), the governments of Helsinki and Stockholm must not do anything that “compromises the security of another OECD member”, of which Russia is also a member. Of course, it is questionable whether the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO would endanger Russia or protect the two Scandinavian countries from future interference from Moscow. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg reiterated this week that the Atlantic Alliance “will not close the doors” to democratic European countries wishing to join it.
So what can we conclude?
That Putin is re-establishing ties between at least a dozen of the former fifteen Soviet republics and aspires to re-establish an influence in the balance of Europe. In Kiev, therefore, there is not only fighting for Ukraine: the security of the whole continent depends on the outcome of the conflict.