Putin’s Potemkin empire

For Russians, the idea that their nation is an empire runs deep. In a poll conducted by Moscow’s Levada Centre at the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in 1999, respondents had two main wishes of their new president: to end the economic crisis and to restore Russia to the status of superpower. Vladimir Putin, the untried new leader, agreed. ‘Russia has been a great power for centuries and remains so,’ he said in August 1999. ‘We still have legitimate zones of interest. We should not drop our guard in this respect, neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored.’

A quarter of a century on, Putin’s great-power project seems, to borrow Emperor Hirohito’s phrase, to have not necessarily turned in Russia’s favour. Last month, Russian troops withdrew from Kidal – a dusty Malian town in the Sahara, which Moscow had seized three years ago and celebrated as proof of its new-found ability to project hard power in Africa. Over the last year Moscow has been powerless to protect its supposed allies in Iran from the overwhelming military force of Israel and the US, has stood by while Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped from the centre of Caracas, and witnessed its closest European ally, Viktor Orbán, lose his grip on power despite the Kremlin’s best efforts to support him. Russia has kept some kind of a hold of its Syrian sea and air bases at Tartus and Khmeimim, despite the collapse and exile to Moscow of their client, Bashar al-Assad. But Russian vessels now have to ask permission to dock at Tartus, with a 49-year basing-rights lease scrapped and Khmeimim due to be converted into a ‘training and humanitarian hub’. Russian logistics support for its scattered forces in Central Africa is now routed through a precarious agreement with the Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Closer to home, the Kremlin has lost political and economic leverage over Central Asia to Beijing, while this week Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was warmly received in Armenia, a long-standing Moscow ally now thoroughly disenchanted by the Kremlin’s betrayal when Azeri troops overran the exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. And Transnistria – Moscow’s frozen-conflict trophy on Moldova’s eastern flank, subsidised for three decades by free Russian gas – has been plunged into humanitarian crisis since Ukraine allowed the Gazprom transit agreement to lapse on New Year’s Day 2025. The enclave has run up $11 billion in unpaid gas debts that Moscow never called in, preferring the political leverage of dependency. That leverage has now evaporated along with the heating.

Putin’s attempt to reconstitute Soviet-era global reach has not merely stalled but is visibly collapsing. The war in Ukraine, far from being the instrument of Russian imperial revival, has become its principal gravedigger.

The deeper truth is that modern Russia never possessed the tools that made Soviet power genuinely global in the first place. The Soviet Union’s reach was staggering in its ambition and, for a time, its effectiveness. At its Cold War zenith, Moscow maintained military bases or a significant troop presence on every inhabited continent. It underwrote revolutionary governments in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and South Yemen. It armed and trained liberation movements from the ANC to the PLO, from the Sandinistas to the Viet Cong. The Comintern and its successors seeded communist parties across Europe, Asia, and Latin America – instruments of ideological penetration that no amount of CIA money could entirely neutralise. Soviet soft power was real and, in its way, formidable: Moscow offered the developing world not just weapons and advisers but a competing civilisational model, an alternative modernity, scholarships to Patrice Lumumba University, and a story about history that many intelligent people found genuinely compelling. The Non-Aligned Movement, which Moscow worked assiduously to cultivate, gave the Soviet Union a chorus of sympathetic voices in the United Nations.

Putin inherited the memory of that project but almost none of its substance. Modern Russia has no ideology to export. Instead, Putin for a while attempted to pose as the leader of global conservatism before shifting to a vague and reactionary anti-westernism. Moscow has no modern equivalent of the Comintern, no network of fraternal parties, no vision of historical progress to offer the Global South. What it has instead is a transactional toolkit: cheap oil and fertiliser, mercenary fighters, disinformation operations, and a willingness to arm juntas that western powers have grown squeamish about supplying. This was never real soft power but rather a cosplaying simulacrum for global desperadoes who can’t aspire to a better class of ally.

The irony is that, objectively, Russia has plenty of serious qualifications to be in the upper ranks of the world’s middle powers. It remains the second largest energy exporter in the world, its economy is either the 11th or fifth largest in the world (depending on which misleading index you use, in dollar terms or purchasing power), and controls the globe’s largest nuclear arsenal and a veto at the United Nations Security Council. Objectively Russia is not, as former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped, ‘Upper Volta with rockets’.

Russia still clearly has the ambition, the funds and the self-confidence – perhaps delusional – to maintain other benchmarks of great-power status in terms of military and space technology, civil engineering projects and global soft-power outreach. Russia still builds its own world-class hi-tech weaponry; for instance, the new Sukhoi 57 fighter, which will supposedly match the stealth capabilities of the US-made F-35. Europe, by contrast, long ago abandoned single-country aviation systems in favour of joint projects such as the Eurofighter and the newer Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System Project. Russia also maintains its own alternative to the US-controlled Global Positioning System, known as the Global Navigation Satellite System or GLONASS, which has been in operation since 1983, with the most recent of its 24 medium-earth satellites launched in March 2025. In space, the cash-strapped RosKosmos hasn’t been able to compete with NASA, Indian or Chinese programmes but work continues doggedly on Venera D, a 2036 mission to land probes on the surface of Venus.

In the wake of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russian engineers built a technically impressive 20-kilometre bridge over the Kerch Strait and is planning another, much shorter bridge linking Sakhalin Island in the Pacific to the mainland. Both Sputnik and RT, twin arms of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, are expanding their foreign-language programming with the recent announcement of RT India (broadcasting in English) to go with Sputnik Afrique, RT Brazil (in Portuguese) and RT Arabic, plus local outlets such as the Cameroon-based Afrique Media (motto: ‘Le Monde, C’est Nous’).

Are all these initiatives realistic attempts to stay in the great power game, or just the phantom limbs of long-lost Soviet global power and technological superiority?

The UK and France managed to ‘box above our weight’, in the words of former UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, by projecting soft power, maintaining a nuclear deterrent and conventional military force for decades after the disappearance of their real-world empires. Putin has achieved the same trick, but in reverse. Instead of increasing Russia’s power and influence over his near abroad, his military adventures have sent his neighbours running for cover. A long run of lucky international gambles in Syria, Libya and Africa have puttered out, as have shallow alliances with Venezuela and Iran.

Instead of making Russia great and respected once more after the humiliations of the 1990s, Putin has achieved the opposite. What ordinary Russians have to say about that remains to be seen.