Protecting Russia or restoring a modernised USSR: Putin's dilemma

Days after launching the "Special Military Operation" ordered by President Vladimir Putin with the entry of the Russian army, first into the separatist region of Donbass and then into the rest of Ukraine, the Kremlin leader's intention remains unclear: how far does he want to go, what is the ultimate aim of the military operation, and what is the ultimate goal of the operation?

There are two scenarios that emerge from this unknown, both of which are possible given current events.

The first is that Russia wants to guarantee itself a demilitarised, denuclearised buffer outside its borders to which NATO or any other US-led military alliance does not have access.

According to this hypothesis, Vladimir Putin will under no circumstances accept the establishment of bases with strategic offensive weaponry, whether nuclear or conventional, on his borders.

The recent crisis in Kazakhstan has clearly shown that Russia has anticipated a scenario that it is not prepared to allow: that in the heat of the democratic revolts inspired and supported by the United States and its Western allies, a regime and a government close to the democratic and liberal theses of George Soros's Open Society and easily manipulated by Washington would be installed in Astana, its capital.

Invoking the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, of which he is a member, Kazakhstan's President Kasim-Yomart Tokaev requested military assistance from Russia because, according to Tokaev, his country was under attack by thousands of armed men from outside the country. Putin convened the Russian Security Council and decided to pre-empt events by aborting the scenario of a new "colour revolution" to overthrow the regime in Kazakhstan.

This is the same Treaty (CSTO) that justified the large-scale military manoeuvres carried out by Russia and Belarus just before unleashing the Special Military Operation that culminated in the intervention of Russian troops in Ukraine.

This Collective Security Treaty (CSTO) was initially signed in May 1992 between six former Soviet republics (Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and later joined by three others, Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia. During these thirty years, the Russian-led CSTO has not taken any major actions or intervened in the internal affairs of its member states. This is despite the fact that Kyrgyzstan requested it in 2010 when the country experienced large protest demonstrations very similar to those that took place very recently in Kazakhstan. At the time, Vladimir Putin opposed intervention on the grounds that it was 'an internal matter' and that the CSTO allows intervention only when one of its members is attacked from outside.

Three of the former members of the Treaty have not renewed their membership - Georgia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan - but the organisation remains in place and has grown in recent decades with regular exercises, the creation of peacekeeping forces in 2007 and rapid reaction forces in 2009, the latter consisting of 20,000 elite troops.

Russia, like China, has the largest borders in the world, the former more than 20,000 kilometres and the latter 2,000 kilometres more. Both have borders with 14 countries. However, China has the advantage that its borders are with Asian countries where Western military presence is smaller. Russia, on the other hand, borders Europe, the Caucasus and the Baltic Sea, and borders countries many of which have joined the European Union and some of which have joined NATO.

Russia's south-eastern flank is stable in the eyes of the Kremlin. The four large Asian neighbouring countries are considered by Moscow as friends or allies: North Korea, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. As for the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus region - both were part of the CSTO, although Azerbaijan later withdrew - Russia has stepped in to mediate the nearly 40-year conflict between the two. The region's complicated political geography has meant that Armenia contains within its borders the majority Azeri-populated "Autonomous Republic of Nakhichevan", while Azerbaijan includes within its borders the unrecognised "Republic of Artsakh", as the majority Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh region is known.

Moscow's main objective in mediating the conflict between its two former Soviet allies was to prevent the "internationalisation" of the conflict, which would have allowed "forces hostile to Russia" to penetrate the region and destabilise its borders. This is why Putin intervened directly in October 2020 to prevent the clashes between the armies of Armenia and Azerbaijan from giving Turkey, as an ally of Azerbaijan, the opportunity for unacceptable interference.

According to this scenario, which we can call "Russia's glacis in the 21st century", Russia's intervention in Ukraine was inevitable. In doing so, Putin pursues several objectives that can be summed up as having a neighbour that is denuclearised and refuses to allow NATO to install its offensive bases there. The rest, for Moscow, is moot. Putin can tolerate as a neighbour a hostile, anti-Russian president who seeks to abolish the Russian language, which is the majority language among the population, and replace it with the Ukrainian language - derived from the former, by the way - or English, who breaks with the Orthodox Church in Moscow and falls into religious secessionism or into the hands of the "Uniate Catholic Church" of western Ukraine, which was a fifth column of Nazism for the invasion of Poland and Russia in the Second World War. Putin can accept all that and more; but he cannot accept Kiev opening the gates of its territory to NATO military bases or US Marines.

The big problem for the Kremlin leader is that a number of his former Soviet allies have already opened doors to Western military forces, including Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Putin's next goal, if the current Ukrainian conflict ends in a negotiation in which Kiev accepts the country's neutrality and closes the door to NATO, will be to get these "Washington-aligned" countries to go no further in their military alliance. 
In addition to NATO's deployment of defensive battalions in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, NATO is militarily present in Bulgaria and Romania.

The Kremlin's aim, at least officially, is to return to the security situation that prevailed in Europe before 1997 when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, US President Bill Clinton, and French President Jacques Chirac. At the time, NATO pledged not to expand in Russia's vicinity. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO; in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO; and five years later, in 2009, Albania and Croatia joined NATO; Montenegro in 2017; and North Macedonia in 2020.

If politics, diplomacy and bilateral and multilateral negotiations have not succeeded, the only way to return to collective security is the use of force, the Kremlin leadership believes. Putin endorses this strategy, and his military chiefs, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valeri Gerasimov, applaud him. Moscow does not want to repeat the bitter experience of its defeat in Afghanistan and its inadequate performance in Syria, and is prepared to go all the way in the war in Ukraine. An end that may well be limited to a negotiated settlement between Putin and Zelensky or a reversal of the internal situation in Ukraine with the overthrow of the current regime and a non-aggression pact between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

The second scenario is that Russia's ultimate goal is to restore a new model of 'institutional union' with willing former members of the Soviet Union and new ones.

This would be a new collective military defence organisation, with Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others, rejoining in addition to the current CSTO members. A way of "turning back the wheel of history" and recovering lost splendour. In the eyes of the Kremlin leader, this project could be completed with a military variant of the Asian alliance initiated between Russia, China and Iran. It is worth recalling Vladimir Putin's view that the fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century", which has left a deep mark on Russia and himself.

Would he thus try to recapture that mythical dream, in other forms?

This "sui generis military alliance", an alternative to NATO, would allow Vladimir Putin to provide himself with an international umbrella of support for "pro-Russian enclaves" that exist in different countries around Russia and that are subject to sanctions, embargoes and external pressures from the countries in which they are located or from the international Western bloc.

This is the case of the Moldovan region of the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic; the Ukrainian regions of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic; the Georgian Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia; the enclave of Kaliningrad, located between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea; and of course the Crimean peninsula with Yalta and Sevastopol. Russia would thus have an international umbrella that would allow it to keep these regions under its control and defend them militarily if necessary.

Whichever of the two variants is considered to be Putin's final strategy, a new international geopolitical and strategic map is still shaping its contours. Russia's penetration of Ukraine is just one chapter of it.