Vladimir Putin has quietly pulled the plug on the Kremlin’s Office for Interregional and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries—a bureaucratic arm set up back in 2005 to push Russian influence across the post-Soviet neighborhood. In its place, he’s ordered the creation of a new Office for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation. On paper, the move is billed as nothing more than “administrative optimization.” In reality, it looks like a tacit admission that Moscow’s two-decade experiment in soft power has gone bust. For years, the Kremlin tried to win hearts and minds in the former Soviet republics through cultural outreach, clandestine political patronage, and lavish funding. Instead, it ended up with dwindling leverage and vanishing trust.
Why did a project that was supposed to build loyalty unravel into scandals, leaks, and Potemkin-style activism? And what comes next for Russia’s regional game plan?
From Color Revolutions to a Special Kremlin Bureau
The idea for a dedicated Kremlin shop to handle the “near abroad” was born out of panic. The early 2000s brought a wave of “color revolutions” that rattled Moscow’s hold over its backyard. In 2003, Georgia saw the Rose Revolution. By late 2004, Ukraine was in the throes of the Orange Revolution. Both uprisings put pro-Western leaders in power, and in the Kremlin’s eyes, threatened to spread like wildfire.
Putin feared that a democratic tide could roll right up to Russia’s borders—and weaken Moscow’s clout in neighboring capitals. By the spring of 2005, a new presidential office was set up with a mission: stop any more velvet revolutions and make sure pro-Russian politicians held onto power in the post-Soviet space.
The scope was sweeping—Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Central Asia, the Baltics, even the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Officially, this was a soft-power project: cultural programs, elite networking, nurturing pro-Russian parties and NGOs. But the reality veered sharply from the script.
Enter the Political Technologists—And Exit, Quickly
The office’s first boss was Modest Kolerov, a Kremlin political strategist known for his hardline nationalism. He pushed aggressive integration under Moscow’s umbrella, and his blunt style quickly became a liability. Kolerov made headlines with fiery statements and heavy-handed tactics that grated on neighboring governments. Within two years he was quietly shown the door, with officials blaming his “excessive radicalism.”
The Kremlin had learned an early lesson: brute force diplomacy doesn’t play well in fragile states. The job required subtler hands—preferably the kind trained in the shadows.
Spycraft Rebranded as Cultural Outreach
From then on, the office became the turf of career intelligence officers. In 2007, it was handed to Nikolai Tsvetkov, a veteran of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In the 1990s, Tsvetkov had posed as a journalist in Japan—working at Komsomolskaya Pravda while freelancing for Yomiuri Shimbun—but his real job was espionage. His stint at the Kremlin didn’t last long.
By 2009, the reins passed to Sergey Vinokurov, a colonel in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence. Vinokurov was known as Moscow’s fixer for the toughest assignments: unrecognized republics, unstable regions, places where Russian leverage was decisive. But his tenure coincided with humiliating setbacks.
In South Ossetia’s 2011 presidential race, the Kremlin’s handpicked candidate lost to opposition leader Alla Dzhioyeva, triggering protests and a court battle that annulled the vote. Around the same time, in Transnistria, Moscow threw its weight behind another favorite—only to watch him lose to Yevgeny Shevchuk, who wasn’t considered a Kremlin loyalist.
For Moscow, these defeats were more than local embarrassments. They were strategic faceplants. Russian media later reported that Vinokurov was yanked from his post over the failures and shunted back to the SVR, where he was quietly parked in a deputy director role—a soft landing that looked a lot like forced retirement.
The Chernov Era: Spies in Suits
In 2012, the job went to Vladimir Chernov, a major general in the SVR and a consummate insider. Chernov had deep ties to Sergei Ivanov, a former defense minister and once one of Putin’s closest confidants. The two had bonded back in the 1980s, when Chernov was a young operative in London, officially working for the International Grains Council before being moved to Finland under diplomatic cover.
Under Chernov, the office became a de facto extension of Russia’s intelligence network. It served as a convenient umbrella for covert operations across the post-Soviet space, while Chernov himself stuck to a familiar playbook in public: railing against “Western-backed color revolutions,” denouncing U.S. and NATO interference, and urging neighbors to stick close to Moscow.
But behind the curtain, the contradictions piled up. Journalists uncovered that the same official blasting the West was spending his vacations at luxury European resorts and sending his granddaughter to school in the United States.
Chernov’s tenure lasted nearly a decade—until 2021—and marked both the peak of the office’s activity and the height of its scandals.
Millions Poured into Elections and the Balalaika Diplomacy
One of the Kremlin office’s core missions was to shape the domestic politics of its neighbors. For that, it built a dedicated planning department, headed by retired KGB-FSB officer Colonel Valery Maksimov. Maksimov became the point man for Moscow’s interference in foreign elections. His team’s job was simple: identify pro-Russian candidates, design their campaigns, feed them resources and political consultants, and manage the narrative through pliant pundits and “experts” who would tilt public opinion in Moscow’s favor.
Among the office’s stable of assets was a familiar face: TV personality and hardline political commentator Sergey Mikheev. Today, Mikheev is a regular fixture on Vladimir Solovyov’s talk shows, spouting Kremlin talking points with trademark venom. But years before his television fame, Mikheev was penning thick analytical briefs on Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltics. Leaked documents reveal his grumbling over how Moscow paid him: stacks of U.S. dollars, handed over in cash, often in torn or outdated bills that currency exchanges refused to accept. The “ripped dollar” fiasco captured the dysfunction and penny-pinching of a system supposedly burning through massive budgets.
Mikheev’s job wasn’t confined to deskwork. On orders from his Kremlin handlers, he often jetted off to former Soviet states during election season, parachuting in as a behind-the-scenes consultant setting up campaign headquarters for Moscow’s chosen candidates. These candidates were often anything but popular.
One telling case came in Georgia in 2020. Ahead of parliamentary elections, General Chernov and Colonel Maksimov persuaded Dmitry Kozak, then the Kremlin’s overseer for the post-Soviet space, to back the Alliance of Patriots of Georgia (APG), a small, hardline opposition party known for its anti-West tirades. The party’s leaders, husband-and-wife duo Irma Inashvili and David Tarkhan-Mouravi, were regulars in Moscow, welcomed at the Duma and hyped up as a rising force. Behind the curtain, more than $10 million was funneled from Russian slush funds into their campaign, with Mikheev running the show from Moscow. But Georgian voters weren’t buying it. APG scraped together barely 3 percent of the vote and failed to enter parliament. The cash evaporated—somewhere. Inside Moscow, whispers grew louder: how much of those millions lined the pockets of Maksimov and Mikheev themselves?
The Baltic Play: Bloggers, “Independent Journalists,” and Zero Results
Other clandestine projects fell flat too. In the Baltics, the Kremlin tried to build a shadow media network of “independent” journalists and bloggers parroting Russian narratives. That portfolio was managed by Colonel Yevgeny Umerenkov, another spy who once masqueraded as a reporter in the U.S. and Mexico. Later he shifted focus to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, cultivating ties with Russian-language outlets and community leaders.
The goal was straightforward: polish Russia’s image and sway the region’s Russian-speaking population. Yet the returns were abysmal. While Umerenkov still appears as a columnist at Komsomolskaya Pravda, tirelessly praising Putin’s “wise leadership,” Kremlin influence in the Baltics has steadily eroded. Governments expelled “journalists” exposed as spies, shuttered pro-Russian organizations, and saw younger generations drift further from Moscow’s orbit.
Moldova: Moscow’s Soft-Power Playground
If there was one place the Kremlin banked heavily on, it was Moldova. With a sizable Russian-speaking minority and the breakaway enclave of Transnistria, the country was considered fertile ground for Moscow’s influence machine. Colonel Igor Maslov, an SVR officer with Balkan experience, was tapped to run the “Moldova desk.” His team churned out exhaustive dossiers on Moldovan politicians and security officials, rating them by loyalty and usefulness to Moscow.
The so-called “Chernov archive”—a trove of leaked documents—contained hundreds of these files. Kremlin operatives even got advance copies of Moldovan politicians’ speeches at international forums and edited them to insert Moscow’s talking points. According to investigative group RISE Moldova, Maslov’s people effectively ghostwrote policy speeches for then-President Igor Dodon, a staunch Russia ally.
In downtown Chisinau, a secret Kremlin office operated as an unofficial campaign hub for Dodon’s Socialist Party. Russian consultants, brought in under the radar, plotted electoral strategies and messaging. Insiders called it the “Moscow Cabinet.”
The arrangement might have stayed hidden if not for a major slip-up. During the 2020 campaign, Dodon lost his official BlackBerry, which landed in journalists’ hands. Its contact list was explosive: dozens of Russian officials, oligarchs, and security officers—including Igor Maslov, who appeared to be Dodon’s most frequent caller. The revelation that Moldova’s president was effectively phoning a Russian spy for guidance was a scandal he never recovered from. Dodon lost the election to a pro-European challenger, and the Kremlin lost a key ally despite years of grooming.
Spies for Every Neighbor
Moscow had carved out handlers for nearly every neighbor. In Azerbaijan, oversight fell to military intelligence officer Valery Chernyshov, who compiled dossiers on the country’s political and military elite. These files could serve as leverage—either for recruitment or blackmail.
In Armenia, another GRU officer, Dmitry Avanesov, ran the show. He cultivated a mole inside the Armenian government who fed him sensitive details, even tracking Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s movements. In the reports, Pashinyan was codenamed “Beard.”
The irony was thick: even in Armenia—a formal ally and member of Moscow’s security bloc—the Kremlin preferred to spy rather than engage in honest dialogue.
Soft Power on Paper, Empty Show in Reality
Officially, the now-defunct Kremlin office was tasked with culture, education, youth programs, and NGO work—the building blocks of a “positive image” of Russia. In theory, this was Moscow’s soft power arm. In practice, it became a Potemkin project: endless reports, staged events, bloated budgets, and the kind of showmanship that fooled no one.
Inside the office, analysts churned out confidential memos for top officials on the state of play in post-Soviet countries. One such report, prepared by the “Azerbaijan desk” for deputy chief Dmitry Kozak, admitted the obvious: Azerbaijan had virtually no pro-Russian civic organizations, while Turkey and other players were gaining ground. The memo urged Moscow to ramp up its NGO presence in the country—revive dormant groups, plant new ones, and “infiltrate Azerbaijani society from within.” The strategy called for special focus on youth, border regions, Russian-language programs, cultural initiatives, and journalism forums. Events, the authors insisted, couldn’t just be one-off conferences; Russia had to be a constant presence in the information space. The memo even suggested swapping out underperforming leaders of Russian diaspora groups for “younger, more energetic” ones.
It seems Moscow tried to follow through. Between 2019 and 2021, emissaries from the Kremlin’s Old Square became frequent visitors to Baku. Russia’s embassy and Rossotrudnichestvo, the federal agency in charge of “soft power,” staged seminars, workshops, and even set up journalism schools for young people. Moscow money bankrolled splashy exhibitions and concerts in the Azerbaijani capital.
The payoff? Zero. One former staffer later confessed bitterly: “By my count, we poured more than $100 million into building ‘friendship’ with Azerbaijan, and it all disappeared into a black hole. Most of it was window dressing or what I call ‘balalaika diplomacy’—lavish receptions, empty talk. And endless drinking. Drinking, drinking, and more drinking.” According to him, much of the cash ended up padding the pockets of organizers or funding meaningless banquets for the usual crowd: Russian diplomats’ acquaintances, ex-expats, and opportunists who showed up for free food, not for lectures about “shared history.”
From Tragedy to Diplomatic Fallout
By 2022–2023, as the Ukraine war escalated, Azerbaijan tried to keep its balance between Moscow and Ankara. But a series of incidents obliterated what little trust remained. In late 2024, tragedy struck when an AZAL passenger jet traveling from Baku to Grozny crashed near Aktau, Kazakhstan. Rumors swirled that the plane may have been downed during military exercises. Rather than investigate transparently, Russian authorities stonewalled, dodged questions, and contradicted themselves. The evasiveness infuriated Baku.
Then came a scandal that blew relations apart. In June 2025, two Azerbaijani brothers, Ziyaddin and Huseyn Safarov, were detained during a special operation in Yekaterinburg, accused of ties to old criminal disputes. Both died soon after in custody. Russian investigators coolly declared “sudden heart failure.” But local sources said the bodies bore clear marks of torture. For Baku, this was the last straw.
Azerbaijan’s response was swift and unflinching. By late February 2025, Baku shut down the local bureau of Sputnik, the Kremlin’s state-run propaganda outlet. The office’s license was revoked, staff expelled, and operations declared over. It was a historic first: a blunt eviction of Moscow’s flagship media arm. High-level contacts with Russia shrank to nearly nothing. Bilateral forums were canceled, and Azerbaijani ministers pointedly avoided Russian counterparts at international gatherings. By early 2025, relations were colder than at any time since the 1990s. And all the multimillion-dollar investments in “winning hearts and minds” had gone up in smoke.
The Same Story Elsewhere
The writing on the wall wasn’t limited to Azerbaijan. Internal dispatches to the Kremlin admitted the same pattern: without cash and perks, nobody wanted to “befriend” Russia. The Armenian desk complained that pro-Russian messaging was coming mostly from politicians well past retirement age—voices the younger generation ignored. Winning over fresh opinion leaders, the memo warned, required money.
In Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asia desk, overseen by Kremlin adviser Alexei Vlasov, painted a bleak picture. “Most of the time, the only attendees at our events are embassy neighbors and their families. Neither they nor their kids care about Russia’s history lectures. They show up for the free coffee and snacks. Then we send doctored photo reports to Moscow about ‘successful seminars,’ when in reality it’s money down the drain. We need to financially incentivize energetic, creative young locals.”
In short, even Moscow’s own operatives admitted that without outright bribery, Russian “soft power” had no pull. The younger generation across the Caucasus and Central Asia looks West—for technology, education, and opportunity. A glossy retelling of the Soviet past, no matter how hard Moscow sells it, simply doesn’t resonate.
Agents of Influence—and the Flop That Followed
Grants and forums weren’t the only arrows in the Kremlin’s quiver. The office also leaned heavily on covert tactics straight out of a Cold War playbook: cultivating “agents of influence.” For years, staffers built meticulous lists of journalists, bloggers, and policy experts across the post-Soviet space who might be nudged into Moscow’s orbit.
One such list, obtained by The Insider, named 136 media figures tagged with notes like: “interesting,” “ours,” “should be recruited,” “playing dumb,” “switched sides,” “only cares about money,” or “unruly—might start a fight at a rally.” It was a checklist that looked less like cultural diplomacy and more like KGB tradecraft applied to the information wars.
Targets were invited to Russia under the guise of press tours or conferences, where they were quietly tested and courted. Some apparently agreed to cooperate—earning the label “ours.” Others were written off as unreliable, greedy, or hostile.
One case veered into pure farce. The list identified journalist Anna Schneider as a Moskva-24 correspondent, marked “work with her, recently divorced from anchor Pivovarov.” The implication was clear: exploit her personal life to reel her in. The only problem? She hadn’t divorced her husband, prominent Russian journalist Alexey Pivovarov. Worse, she hadn’t worked at Rossiya-24 in years. Investigators later suggested that Kremlin handlers either padded their reports with fake intel to justify budgets—or simply confused her with another Anna Schneider in Latvia who did freelance for Russian-language outlets. When contacted, the Pivovarovs flatly denied everything. The whole fiasco underscored just how sloppy and unserious the effort had become.
Some journalists from the region later admitted they’d accepted invitations to Moscow or Sochi forums, only to be quietly approached about “closer cooperation.” Reactions varied. Some politely brushed it off. Others grew paranoid, convinced they were being targeted by Russian intelligence. A few cut off contact entirely. In the end, the Kremlin failed to build any meaningful network among younger media voices. Most who were openly pro-Russian were already on board—typically older nostalgics for the Soviet Union with little reach. Younger bloggers treated ideology as a transactional nuisance: take the money, but don’t change the content. Russia was trying to buy affection, and even then the returns were meager.
Leaks and the End of the Old Guard
By early 2021, the office itself was engulfed in scandal. A massive leak of internal documents—including correspondence and analytical reports on CIS countries—blew the lid off its operations. Dubbed the “Chernov Archive,” the trove was passed to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center and then to outlets like RISE Moldova and The Insider.
The leaks revealed everything: backchannel coordination with Moldova’s Igor Dodon, detailed reports on neighboring states, and even the agent-of-influence lists. Moscow was forced to act. In February 2021, General Vladimir Chernov, who had run the office for nearly a decade, was retired. Officially, it was framed as “pension,” but everyone understood: he was ousted over a catastrophic security breach and the office’s mounting ineffectiveness.
In a twist that baffled even veterans of Russia’s intelligence world, Chernov’s replacement was none other than Igor Maslov—the same SVR colonel who had disastrously mishandled Moldova. As one retired spy put it to reporters, seething: “Maslov lost Moldova, and they made him head of the entire office! What’s he done since? Opened a Russian Book House in Yerevan, flew to South Ossetia and Kyrgyzstan for photo ops. That’s it. I don’t know how this man even got into the service.”
Under Maslov, little changed. The office was already an anachronism—out of step with a Europe reshaped by full-scale war in Ukraine and the collapse of old-style influence networks.
Through 2022, Kremlin deputy chief Dmitry Kozak remained the formal overseer of the portfolio. A seasoned operator, Kozak had handled everything from domestic politics to Crimea after 2014. But once Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine, his clout dwindled. Reports suggested Kozak floated compromise proposals to Kyiv, angering hawks in Moscow. By 2023, the Kremlin’s information outreach and soft power in neighboring states had effectively spun out of control. Allies peeled away; others froze the relationship.
The August 2025 Reset
The final act came in August 2025. With one sweeping decree, Putin abolished both the Office for Interregional and Cultural Ties and its twin, the Office for Border Cooperation. In their place, the Kremlin announced a new structure: the Office for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation. The new unit will be overseen not by Kozak, but by Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s powerful first deputy chief of staff.
Chief of Staff Anton Vaino has three months to finalize the structure and roster. Insider accounts suggest the Kremlin wants no trace of the old, compromised guard. Figures like Maslov, Maksimov, and other scandal-tainted operatives won’t make the cut. Instead, the plan is to bring in younger cadres, a mix of next-generation intelligence officers and Kremlin-loyal political consultants.
The message is clear: Moscow wants a reboot. A clean slate. No baggage from years of failure, leaks, and botched influence ops. Whether this reboot will succeed—or just repeat the same costly mistakes under new branding—remains the real question.
A New Partnership—or Just Another Dead End?
The big question is whether a shiny new nameplate and a shuffle of personnel can really change anything. Since the war in Ukraine, the entire regional landscape has shifted. Most post-Soviet states are keeping Moscow at arm’s length—at least publicly. For them, the Kremlin is no longer a protector but a source of instability and risk. Even formal allies inside the CSTO, like Kazakhstan and Armenia, are increasingly charting independent courses. As for countries already looking West—Moldova, Georgia—or those leaning on other heavyweights like Turkey or China, the drift away from Moscow is even more pronounced.
Defense budgets tell the story. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and even neutral Turkmenistan have dramatically increased military spending in the last two years, by anywhere from 8 to 15 percent annually. Kazakhstan alone boosted its defense budget by nearly 50 percent in 2022 and another 10–12 percent in 2023. The message is obvious: Russia’s neighbors now view it as a potential aggressor. And they’re hedging not with Russian weapons, but with Turkish drones like Bayraktar and Anka, Chinese artillery systems and comms tech, and contracts with Western defense firms. Moscow is no longer the region’s default security provider. Meanwhile, old military ties are quietly unraveling. Uzbekistan left the CSTO years ago, Turkmenistan never joined, and in 2023 both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan canceled joint CSTO drills on their soil, wary of stoking anti-war sentiment at home.
Diplomatic Isolation
The political picture is just as stark. Russia’s diplomacy has bled influence. With the exception of Belarus, no member of the Eurasian Economic Union or CIS recognized Moscow’s annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2022. Even the most dependent regimes balked. On global stages, most partners abstain—or side with resolutions condemning Russia’s violations of international law. Leaders across Central Asia and the Caucasus now stress “multi-vector foreign policy,” sovereignty, and territorial integrity—the very principles Russia has trampled in Ukraine.
Sanctions add another layer. With Moscow under intense Western pressure, its neighbors are forced to tiptoe. Their banks and markets are flooded with Russian capital, but their governments are careful not to trigger secondary sanctions. The new playbook is pragmatic: trade with a weakened Russia, but avoid binding political or military commitments.
What Can the New Office Offer?
Against this backdrop, what does the Kremlin’s brand-new Office for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation really bring to the table? The label sounds appealing—“strategic partnership” implies equality and friendship. Perhaps the Kremlin wants to shift the focus toward economics, investments, and infrastructure, moving away from ideological “Russian World” rhetoric toward tangible benefits.
There’s logic here. The new office absorbed the old department for border cooperation, which had traditionally handled practical issues like trade and transport in cross-border regions. The hope may be to convince neighbors that Russia can still deliver real value—money, investment, preferential deals—rather than stale cultural slogans.
The choice of Sergei Kiriyenko as overseer reflects that shift. Kiriyenko, a former prime minister, has long specialized in crisis management and political projects. He masterminded domestic youth initiatives like the Tavrida arts forum, Victory Volunteers, and the “Russia – Land of Opportunity” platform. The bet seems to be that he can repackage Russia’s image for a younger generation abroad—through education, tech, startup grants, student stipends, and youth exchanges. Indeed, agencies like Rossotrudnichestvo and the Russkiy Mir Foundation have ramped up outreach in Central Asia, dangling free trips, Russian language courses, and scholarships.
The Trust Deficit
But the elephant in the room is trust—or rather, the lack of it. As long as Russian tanks are smashing Ukrainian cities, no cultural festival or scholarship program will outweigh the fear. Kazakh analysts openly admit: “We saw what happened to Ukraine. We can’t afford to be next.” In Moldova, anti-Russian sentiment has only deepened since 2022, driving the country closer to the EU and shrinking the space for pro-Moscow parties. Even in Armenia—long seen as Russia’s closest ally—disillusionment is mounting. The Kremlin’s passivity during the Karabakh crisis left Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan looking elsewhere, strengthening ties with the U.S. and EU without formally severing Moscow.
Across the board, from Minsk to Dushanbe, governments are diversifying their foreign policy portfolios. In October 2023, for the first time, all five Central Asian presidents met the U.S. president in a joint summit—without Russia in the room. Around the same time, Beijing hosted its own “China + Central Asia” gathering, pledging tens of billions in investment and deeper integration.
In this environment, the Kremlin’s old playbook—installing proxies, pushing propaganda about “shared history”—is dead on arrival. A fresh image of Russia would require not just money, but moral authority and inspiration. And that’s the rub: today’s Russia projects fear, repression, and war. Instead of a beacon, it has become a scarecrow.
Clearing Out the Augean Stables—or Just Rearranging the Dirt?
The shuttering of the Kremlin’s scandal-plagued office is both overdue and, perhaps, necessary. For years, the very name of that department became synonymous with espionage, meddling, corruption, and hollow pageantry. Dismantling it and launching a new unit gives Moscow a chance to rethink its approach in the post-Soviet space. But the real question is whether the Kremlin can actually craft a model of partnership that looks attractive to its neighbors.
So far, the rhetoric hasn’t budged. Russian officials still drone on about “unity” and “special relations,” while chastising neighbors for “ingratitude” whenever they tilt Westward. That patronizing tone lands badly, sparking only irritation.
For Moscow to regain lost ground, it would need to radically change course: drop the threats and ultimatums, respect the genuine sovereignty of its neighbors, and invest in their development without a hidden agenda. Is today’s regime capable of that? Unlikely. What seems far more probable is cosmetic rebranding—a quieter office, some new faces, and more careful messaging after so many failures. But if the underlying mission remains restoring neo-imperial influence, then the outcome will look just like the last twenty years: wasted money and shrinking clout.
The End of an Era
Russia’s “soft power” strategy—once billed as a way to compensate for lost hard control—has run out of steam. It’s devolved into empty gestures: friendship forums that fooled no one, budgets burned on Potemkin projects. And when the real stress test came—the war in Ukraine—it became painfully clear that Moscow had almost no genuine allies left.
The new generations in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics have already set their course toward Europe. Central Asia is chasing economic growth through China and other partners, not Russia. True, cultural and human ties remain. Millions of families are still bound across borders, and tens of millions still speak Russian. But that isn’t nearly enough to persuade countries to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of “friendship” with a domineering neighbor.
The closure of the old office marks the symbolic end of an era in Russian foreign policy—an era when Moscow believed it could micromanage its neighbors from the shadows by funding loyalists and squeezing dissenters. That world is gone. The new reality is one in which respect can’t be bought—not for millions, not for billions. Whether the Kremlin can accept that truth will determine the future of Russia’s place in its own neighborhood.