The meeting between the Russian and US presidents in Alaska last year caused a sensation in both form and substance. Expectations were so high, whether expressed as hope or alarm, that the Anchorage summit was almost certain to disappoint.

The conflict surrounding Ukraine is too deep and complex to be resolved at a single meeting, even one involving the leaders of Russia and the United States. Negotiations to end the Vietnam War dragged on for years, despite both sides understanding from the beginning that the conflict would eventually have to end.

The real question was whether Anchorage could provide the starting point for a peace process; it didn’t. Much has since been said about why, although the conditions for such a breakthrough probably didn’t exist in the first place. Yet rather than dismissing the summit with the usual sarcasm about the “spirit of Anchorage,” it’s worth considering what the meeting did achieve.

First, it exposed the widening divergence between the United States and Western Europe as the old world’s leaders remain committed to seeking a military victory over Russia, but Washington, by contrast, doesn’t want to become directly involved in pursuing that objective.

Donald Trump’s claim that the United States is merely a mediator rather than a participant is plainly disingenuous, given that Washington remains deeply involved, but American involvement could be far greater, even allowing for the apparent limits on its resources and its growing obligations elsewhere.

This divergence doesn’t mean the transatlantic alliance is about to collapse; however, it does suggest that the Atlanticism established during the second half of the 20th century will not survive in its old form. Whether its replacement will prove more advantageous to Russia remains unclear, but, nevertheless, Moscow has long wished to see the end of NATO as we have known it, and the chances of that happening are increasing.

Anchorage also demonstrated that the United States isn’t all-powerful, as Trump was unable to secure from Western Europe and Ukraine what he wanted at the time. In that instance, Washington’s failure worked against Moscow, but the broader recognition that American power has limits should be regarded as a positive development.

Taken together, these lessons show that the West is becoming more diverse and internally divided, so its remaining unity must increasingly be maintained by political pressure and institutional inertia. Russia must therefore develop a more sophisticated and flexible policy towards Western countries, exploiting their growing differences rather than continuing to treat them as a single bloc.

Anchorage offered a revealing model of modern diplomacy, in which personalities increasingly matter more than institutions, and character more than principles. There are no longer any “magic” agreements and a gentleman’s agreement lasts only until another gentleman arrives with different priorities.

What retains value is composure and reliance on one’s own capabilities, combined with a sober assessment of their limits. Russia’s mistake before Anchorage was to imagine Trump as an external force capable of fundamentally changing the situation, but he didn’t play that role, nor could he have done so.

That disappointment returned everyone to the reality of the conflict in that no outside power can impose its resolution. During the year since Alaska, the Russian-Western European military confrontation has acquired a clearer direction and an internal logic of its own and it’s within that logic that Russia must seek a way to end the present war and prevent the next one, without waiting for magical solutions or grand bargains imposed from abroad.

This article was first published by Kommersant and was translated and edited by the RT team.

As recently as 26 July this year, Ursula von der Leyen appeared full of confidence in victory during her visit to Kyiv: she claimed the tide of the war had turned, that Ukraine had regained the initiative, and that Russia was on the defensive. The cause of this supposed turnaround, after four and a half years of a devastating war, is said to be a new ‘wonder weapon’: drones which, with the help of AI provided by Palantir and others, can carry the war deep into the Russian hinterland and precisely destroy oil refineries and other critical infrastructure there. The Russian economy – particularly the energy sector – is said to be severely weakened, and the war Russia started has now hit the country itself “with full force”.

On the battlefield too, according to these accounts, Ukraine has achieved considerable success with autonomously operating “killer drones”. These drones are said to be capable of automatically detecting and destroying all life at a distance of 30 kilometres on the front line. Technology, it is claimed, has thus more than compensated for the shortage of Ukrainian soldiers. Russian soldiers, by contrast, are now said paying a heavy price in lives without being able to demonstrate any military successes. This must be wearing down the aggressors and forcing Putin to acknowledge that he is going to lose the war.

These accounts were accompanied by media-effective drone attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg. No wonder, then, that the mainstream Western media have been full of victory reports over the past two months. Some even speculated that Russia could only hold out for another six months; a coup in Moscow was deemed possible. The strategically important Crimea was said to have been largely cut off from Russia by Ukrainian attacks. Putin would now be forced to the negotiating table as the loser – and on the terms of the European NATO states, which would amount to a Russian surrender. Their policy of providing massive military, political and financial support to Ukraine, whilst at the same time refusing any talks until Russia was ‘brought to its knees’, seemed to have paid off.

But is that really the case? Or may the tide actually have turned in Russia’s favour?

It is striking that for the past week there have been hardly any reports on the course of the war, and the victory announcements have largely fallen silent. This is because doubts are mounting, both in the US and in Ukraine itself, about the success of the drone war deep within the Russian hinterland.

One need only heed the warnings of General Zaluzhnyi: the drone war is not very successful and far too expensive. As a former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and current ambassador to London, he should know. According to the pro-Ukrainian war monitors ‘Dron-Bomber’, the Russians are now reportedly achieving a high shoot-down rate of Ukrainian drones. The dismissal of Ukrainian Defence Minister Fedorov is also likely to be linked to the looming failure of the drone war. Is the realisation taking hold that this conflict cannot be won by a drone warfare alone?

This means that developments on the battlefield remain decisive. However, there can be no question of the military stalemate claimed by the Western media. According to a report by the Ukrainian ‘Telegram Channel’: “in July this year, the armed forces of the Russian Federation occupied 728.45 km² of territory in the SVO (Special Operation) zone, which represents the best result since October 2024 … The pace of the Russian armed forces’ offensive is increasing”. Russian territorial gains are said to have occurred not only in the Donbas but also around Kharkiv and in Zaporizhzhia. This is still proceeding slowly, but it is a war of attrition whose primary aim is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Could this objective be achieved by capturing the last remaining fortified defensive positions around the Donbas cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

Even more serious for Ukraine is the fact that its drone attacks have led to a hardening of the Russian position. The Russian leadership is now openly speaking of a war – including a war by NATO against Russia – and has significantly intensified the conflict. In the cruel logic of war, the destruction in Ukraine now far exceeds that in Russia. Another crucial factor is that Ukraine has no air defences to speak of and is barely able to defend itself against massive Russian drone and missile attacks, whilst the intensity of Ukrainian attacks is reportedly waning.

This is already having consequences. The Ukrainian Black Sea ports in and around Odessa are said to have been bombed so heavily that Ukraine has effectively become a ‘landlocked country’. If these reports are accurate, this would be a severe blow: to date, around 70 per cent of all Ukrainian imports and exports, as well as 90 per cent of agricultural exports, have been handled via these ports. Key bridges, such as the Zatoka Bridge, which connects Odessa with the Romanian Black Sea ports, have also been destroyed. Furthermore, rail and road links, petrol stations, the power grid, industrial facilities and warehouses are being systematically destroyed.

The European NATO member states can do little to change this – they lack the military capabilities. Plans to station a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Poland or even to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine are completely unrealistic. The United States has recently announced that it will hand over the leadership of the NATO centre in Wiesbaden, which coordinates military support for Ukraine, entirely to European NATO member states. There is even talk of disbanding this NATO facility, which is crucial for Ukraine. Further, with the Iran war ranging, the US has hardly any weapons left to spare. There can therefore be little question of renewed US military involvement in the war in Ukraine.

Even before the latest escalation of the war, there were clear indications that the Ukrainian army was in considerable difficulty. Upon taking office in January, Minister Fedorov spoke of around 200,000 deserters; other MPs even cited significantly higher figures. Furthermore, some two million Ukrainian men are said to have evaded conscription orders. Whichever figures are accurate, they point to an alarming state of affairs within the Ukrainian armed forces – a situation that cannot be remedied either by forced recruitment on the streets or, as is now becoming apparent, by drones controlled by artificial intelligence. Similarly, a proposal now being discussed by the EU – to withdraw refugee status from Ukrainian men who have fled, in breach of international law, and to send them back to Ukraine to face the war – is further evidence of the hopelessness of the situation.

In May, the Ukrainian Minister for Social Affairs, Denys Ulyutin, stated that the population in the government-controlled part of the country had shrunk from 52 million (at the time of independence in 1991) to possibly 22 million. Of these, around 11 million are on social security, predominantly pensioners and war invalids. He expects the population to continue to fall after the war ends, as young men – once exempt from military service – would follow their families to the West. He does not expect any significant return of Ukrainians living abroad. Added to this demographic decline are increasing impoverishment, deep social inequalities, pervasive corruption, astronomical public debt and the country’s economic collapse.

This is hardly a state – let alone an army – to which the media could realistically attribute an imminent military turnaround or even victory.

Of course, such forecasts must be treated with caution. Yet the apparent failure of the drone war to bring about a strategic turning point should make it clear to the European NATO member states that, at the end of this escalation which we have accompanied with such fanfare, Ukraine may not emerge as the victor, but is instead sliding into an increasingly devastated, depopulated and bled-dry country. This should give us cause for great concern for the suffering people in Ukraine. European NATO-states must ask themselves whether a continuation of the war – which they have demanded and supported – can still be morally justified at all.

The European NATO member states are only harming Ukraine with their illusions of victory and wonder weapons, and must finally base their policy on a more realistic assessment of how the war is unfolding. It is therefore time to consider what would happen if the Ukrainian army’s resistance were to collapse one day and Russia were to capture Kharkiv and Odessa as well. Any remnant of Ukraine that remained would scarcely be viable. It must be in the top interest not only of Ukraine but also of its western backers to prevent such a scenario to develop. But how?

Certainly, this cannot be prevented through direct military intervention by NATO. This would make the situation only much worse – also for Ukraine – as such a course of action would inevitably entail the risk of a nuclear war, which nobody can win. Diplomacy therefore remains the only realistic option. After almost five years of war, it is high time that the European NATO member states actively sought dialogue with Russia. Germany – given its role as the strongest country in the EU, its geographical location and its historical responsibility – should take the first step.

To move beyond the entrenched positions of both governments, an initial rapprochement through a civil‑society initiative involving respected and influential figures may be advisable. Such an approach could open a first, cautious pathway toward renewed understanding after years of silence and mutual demonisation. Europe needs peace, and lasting peace can only be achieved with Russia, not against it.

There is not much time left for this.

This text has been published in Russian in the newspaper Kommersant as part of the project Contours of the Future.

There is one brutal truth about war. No matter how devastating it becomes, states continue to find reasons to fight each other. But while war is a permanent attribute of global politics, its characteristics are always evolving.

Today, military power has been democratized by changes in warfare technologies and economics. The proliferation of cheap, precise, and mass-produced drones and missiles has leveled the playing field, allowing small states to compel larger, more sophisticated militaries to accept stalemate. Already, protracted wars have ensnared the United States and Russia, two of the most powerful militaries, and this trend will continue.

Over the next decade, easily deployed destructive weapons will ordain indecisive conflicts that cost a lot and achieve little. This will not convince political leaders that military force should be abandoned. But it will shape the tactics of future wars, as states will try to avoid the challenges of attrition warfare.

First, hybrid tactics—those that fall just below the threshold of full-scale conflict—will become more prevalent and aggressive. These tools have clear benefits for states trying to stay out of long and expensive confrontations because they limit direct involvement, attribution, and the scope of the victim’s retaliation. These tactics are already widely used. China, for example, has exploited hybrid methods against Taiwan and Japan to limit their freedom of maneuver.

In future wars states will upgrade their use of hybrid tools qualitatively and quantitatively. They will substitute them for conventional warfare, using pressure to open space for future more assertive military action. They will also revise the boundary between war and peace, normalizing a new hybrid status quo that encompasses even some kinetic operations.

This might include physical destruction of critical infrastructure, debilitating cyber and economic campaigns, and limited strikes on government and civilian targets.

As a result, future war will increasingly develop into a daily routine, spilling off battlefields into the lives of average citizens far from frontlines.

Second, wars fought primarily as campaigns of dueling deep strikes will become more common and punishing. Such ‘stand-off wars’ (so named because they can be fought by adversaries far from a line of contact) have a low and falling cost of entry, but they can still impose physical and psychological damage, destroy industrial capacity, or disrupt an adversary’s military development. This makes them seductive for states seeking to avoid expensive ground campaigns and the collateral risk of a deadlock.

In the past, deep strike capabilities were the privilege of major powers, but this is changing. States will still invest in advanced powerful missiles, but they can also turn to inexpensive long-range munitions and drones that are almost as effective if less powerful. This will expand the frequency of stand-off wars but also their ferocity, as combatants increase the volume, precision, and payload of their strikes, as seen in the Iran war.

As deep strike weapons become faster, more deadly and difficult to intercept, acceptable target sets are likely to be expanded, making future stand-off wars more grueling and terrifying for civilian populations. In addition, as deep strike weapons can more easily hit sensitive military sites and assassinate leaders, their use will feed insecurity, fuel arms race, and make pre-emptive attacks or nuclear strikes more likely.

Finally, future war will be increasingly automated. This may not mean war fought by robots, but rather by remote-operated uncrewed systems and artificial intelligence.

The push for automation is about efficiency. Reliance on AI-controlled, remote-operated, and uncrewed systems make war faster and less personal. These systems reduce the demand for manpower, allow military commanders to take greater risks, and speed decision-making in high pressure environments. Israel, for example, has used such systems in Gaza to search houses and map tunnels while soldiers remained out of danger.

As their quality improves, automated and AI-powered systems will dominate warfare planning and execution. This will relegate military personnel to the role of programmer or remote operator. However, automation may never be absolute. Autonomous systems cannot (yet) replicate human strategic thinking or judge context.

Automated war will feel different to those involved. It is hard to imagine a populace being invested in a war fought by machines on their behalf, though this prospect is deeply unnerving. Automated war will also bring uncertainty and misperception, especially when errors occur, which will complicate decision-making and lead wars to spiral in undesired ways.This picture of future warfare is unsettling. Political leaders may think twice about costly ground invasions. But the type of warfare that emerges instead will be more diffuse, blurring the line between war and not war. It will also be more vicious and perilous, dominated by high-powered missiles and automated systems only loosely controlled by humans.

Future wars, then, will not be more decisive or controllable. They will simply swap the old risks for new risks, leaving the enduring potential for catastrophe unchanged.

After U.S. Navy forces attacked two Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf on 19 October 1987, Wall Street suffered one of the heaviest losses in its history—$560 billion. Black Monday went down in history next to the 1929 stock market crash.[1] But a rising New York property man from Brooklyn was already underscoring the vital importance of not permitting Iran to possess nuclear weapons. That man was Donald Trump.[2]

The Iran war which began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on 28 February this year (following the Twelve-Day War in summer 2025) is in a strategic stalemate. The ceasefire exists only on paper and concerns about escalation are growing.

Since WWII, major democracies have been the ones who started most wars of aggression or got involved in asymmetric wars against smaller states—Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, and Algeria. Remarkably, they lost most of them.[3] Today, the U.S., vastly superior militarily and economically, is stuck in an asymmetric war with an extremely uneven distribution of power. Why is the global power, with a military budget exceeding the combined volume of the next ten largest states’ budgets, unable to defeat a middle power?

My assumption is that since an asymmetric war is not a matter of existence for democracies (unlike for their weaker opponents), public opposition to the continuation of such a war—especially where there is no coherent overall strategy— soon begins to grow, raising pressure on the executive to end it as quickly as possible, i.e. without achieving the objectives and thus losing the war.

In an asymmetric war[4] the politically, militarily, and economically weaker party, which cannot defeat the stronger party in an ‘open battle’ (i.e., impose its will on the opponent by kinetic means, to borrow from Clausewitz), employs non-kinetic means along kinetic (military) ones: attacking public opinion through disinformation and a war of narratives, destabilizing the opponent’s public institutions, influencing government policy, and shaping public opinion in its favor—exactly as great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu recommended in the 5th century BC.[5]

This does not mean that Iran is exploiting and fanning the flames of antiwar opinion among the American public or covertly spreading Iranian propaganda in the U.S., for example, by paying American actors.[6] But in an asymmetric war decisions leading to victory or failure lie in the realms of morale, legitimacy, politics, and/or the economy, or a combination of the above, with the dominant factors shifting over the course of the war.[7]

What is important in any war, including asymmetric, is a clearly defined unambiguous political objective. By contrast, the means to achieve this objective can and must be deployable in any combination without restriction.[8] In the book fittingly titled Unrestricted Warfare in the English translation, Chinese military leaders and party officials Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui identify different types of warfare according to the dominant means deployed: environmental war (change of the weather and composition of the atmosphere, artificial earthquakes, and engagement through NGOs; psychological warfare; smuggling warfare; media warfare; drug warfare (e.g., fentanyl in the U.S.); resources warfare, economic aid warfare (with development assistance as a disguise for control of a foreign market); cultural warfare (assimilation by cultural hegemony); international law warfare.[9]

The problem for the U.S.—and generally for the collective West and to a certain extent for Russia in the Ukraine war—is the misguided belief that political, military, and/or economic objectives can be achieved through technological superiority alone. This delusion can metapolitically be traced to the Enlightenment ideology of progress, advocating the creation of a kind of technological nirvana—a secular, materialist, atheistic paradise on Earth built with the help of technology. The Chinese military thinkers decry this fallacy on several points, emphasizing that “…in future warfare, certain advanced weapons may play a leading role. However, as for determining the outcome of war, it is now very difficult for anyone to occupy an unmatched position.”[10] Referring to U.S. strategists, they write: “They would rather treat war as the opponent in the marathon race of military technology and are not willing to look at it more as a test of morale and courage, wisdom and strategy.”[11]

William Lind, a wise American military theorist, agrees—not least with regard to the current war with Iran—that faith in technological superiority and air power is a major error of U.S. strategy, which keeps failing in asymmetric wars and conflicts.

Lind cites Gen. Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff at the time, who frankly admitted on camera: “Historically, air power has over-promised and under-delivered.”[12] In that respect the hype around drones is also futile. Recent research by the Swiss renowned Center for Security Studies (CSS) clearly shows that: “…while new technologies and the novel adoption and adaptation of existing platforms such as drones function as force multipliers in specific contexts, they have not yet produced a fundamental revolution.”[13] A revolution in military affairs (RMA) is defined not as the use of some new supposed wonder weapon (Wunderwaffe) but as “a profound transformation in the character and conduct of warfare produced by the innovative application of technology in conjunction with fundamental changes in doctrine, organization, and operational concepts.”[14]

To apply the foregoing to the Iran war: first and foremost, the U.S. had no clearly defined objective to the war and therefore no coherent overall strategy. Over the course of the war, the U.S. administration has cited a wide range of aims, which are certainly not clearly defined or unambiguous:

• to prevent Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons;
• to neutralize its military capabilities, such as the missile program, or destroy the Iranian navy;
• to stop Iranian support for proxies (militias) in Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon;
• to effect regime change;
• to contain Israel, which would have attacked with or without the U.S., through joint coordination and loss reduction;
• to protect freedom of navigation (after the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz).

In fact, this variety of aims reflects the varying views on the Iran war of leading representatives of the U.S. administration. Vice President JD Vance, for instance, whom Trump ordered to Pakistan to negotiate with the Iranians, was against the war right from the beginning.[15]

Another striking fact about the U.S.’s lacking a coherent overall strategy is that the Iranian threat to block the Strait of Hormuz had been known for years. As early as December 2011, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, then Vice-President of Iran, warned that “if sanctions are adopted against Iranian oil, not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz.”[16] So this came as no surprise to Washington and should have been incorporated in the U.S. strategy—particularly when it came to planning countermeasures.

Without clear aims, it is also impossible to communicate clearly. No wonder that most Americans have been against the war from the very beginning. Since its outbreak, almost two out of three Americans have expressed opposition to Trump’s continued attacks against Iran and see the progress of the war as negative for the United States. Even among Republicans, a large proportion (especially in younger age groups) take a highly critical view of the war.[17]

This is where Iran’s strategic closure of the Strait of Hormuz comes into play—at least for Western states and U.S. allies in the region. The blockade has a huge impact on energy supplies, given that a fifth of the world’s oil and gas is transported via that seaway. Fuel prices, in turn, have a direct impact on inflation. A blockade of such transport routes hampers energy supplies essential for many industries. It also affects food production and shipping of fertilizers—which makes food prices rise across the world, and even exacerbates or significantly contributes to famine in some regions. It is therefore not surprising why most Americans want a quick end to the war and welcomed the memorandum of understanding which was to guarantee free passage for at least 60 days and find a follow-on solution for the Strait of Hormuz.[18] U.S. citizens’ concerns in relation to the Iran war do not center around democracy or regime change, they are primarily about gas prices, the deployment of ground troops (which the majority oppose), and their own casualties.[19] Even the notoriously passive House of Representatives, including the Republicans, has voted two times(!) against the continuation of the Iran war.[20]

Iran has been preparing for this war since 1979 and is playing its hand cleverly, not only on the economic plane. Political analyst Mehran Zolfagharieh notes that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corpse’s aim is to gain a psychological victory, sap or even eliminate the opponent’s will to fight. Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC from 2007 to 2019, said: “Asymmetric warfare… is [our] strategy for dealing with the considerable capabilities of the enemy.” In that view, the key capabilities of the Iranian armed forces are manpower, strategic thinking, and willingness to absorb losses while exploiting the weakness of their enemies who tend to be risk-averse, sensitive to losses, and tightly bound to their technology or dependent on it as well as on regional bases.[21]

So, what to do, Mr Trump? The problem is that the U.S. has maneuvered itself into a strategy dilemma. In order to win the war, it would have to massively escalate hostilities and, for example, occupy the oil hub Kharg Island (whoever controls Kharg Island controls Iran’s oil) and the Strait of Hormuz simultaneously.

However, this would mean[22] deploying U.S. ground troops and risking the lives of American soldiers, which, given the American public’s aversion to casualties[23] and opposition to the use of ground troops, would make the Republicans’ stock fall even further—and that in the run-up to the midterms in November. An occupation beyond Kharg would be an adventure with incalculable risks: Iranian big cities and important military bases with nuclear infrastructure are protected by the Elburs Mountains in the north and the Zagros Mountains in the West. In the East, there are the Salt and Lut Deserts. According to some estimates, to occupy the whole of Iran, the U.S. military would need 3,3 million soldiers.[24]

Yet things cannot remain as they are: Iran is still in a position to threaten the U.S. allies and American bases in the region and is likely now to want nuclear weapons more than ever.[25] An important point, not only from the U.S. perspective but also Europe’s, is that control of the Strait of Hormuz remains with Iran, which will probably also demand tolls for passage—possibly even in Chinese renminbi, which would be another step towards de-dollarization.[26]

Iran is exploiting U.S. strategic cul-de-sac: Trump can move neither forward nor backward, and is now exactly where Tehran wants him to be. The lesson of history, applicable to all asymmetric wars, is: “If strategists have little or no confidence that a prospective war can be kept short, then arguably the only prudent policy is not to fight it at all.”[27] This vital point was clear to John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829): “Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”[28]

The 1979 hostage crisis (U.S. Embassy in Tehran), was resolved not through direct military action, but the freezing of Iranian currency reserves, the arms embargo, and support for Iraq in its war against Iran, which, along with subsequent diplomatic negotiations, helped to achieve the U.S.’s aims.[29]

Today, like in the past, it is time to take a diplomatic route, combined, of course, with (military) pressure—not least because no other route is realistic.

Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, has a conversation with The Peacemonger. He offers a frank assessment of why Western Europe remains committed to the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine – and why ending it now could create serious political challenges for Brussels, Berlin and Paris. The discussion focuses on the internal logic of the European Union, the position of Donald Trump’s America, Russia’s red lines, the future of Donbass, Vladimir Zelensky’s political prospects, and Europe’s military-industrial dependence on the conflict in Ukraine. The conversation also addresses why the prospects for genuine diplomacy remain extremely limited.

The conversation is available via this link.

In the aftermath of the US-Iran war, what is the outlook for the global oil market? Will new sanctions-related risks emerge? Finally, what strategies will oil producers and buyers adopt to manage geopolitical risks?

These three questions are relevant for India because of its voluminous oil consumption and rising imports. India relies on imports for over 85% of its petroleum needs and currently consumes over 4.5 million barrels per day of oil. This number is projected to increase to 10 million barrels per day over the next 15-20 years. Therefore, each of these issues is relevant to India.

Outlook for the Global Oil Market

There is a comfortable surplus supply in the global oil market. This is evident from the fact that despite the single biggest disruption since World War II, prices have stayed well under control. As of early July, while the oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz is much lower than the long-term average, the price of oil is back to its pre-crisis levels.

This is a sharp contrast from the 2005-07 era, when the oil supply was tight, and news such as an accident at an oil field or a terror attack in an oil-producing country was enough to send the price rising. Judging by the relatively sluggish movements in oil prices—compared to the magnitude of such moves historically—it can be concluded that the global oil supply comfortably exceeds the demand.

Historically, OPEC has been regarded as the swing producer in the oil market, which sets prices by reducing or increasing oil production. However, this has not been the case for the past several years, largely due to rising oil production in the US, and falling oil demand from the Western world. The shale oil producers in the US are the true swing producers now. Within OPEC, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have historically maintained ‘spare production capacity’—which helps keep markets stable. However, this also represents hundreds of billions of dollars of idle capex.

Quote 1

UAE’s exit from OPEC is a belated acknowledgement that the grouping is no longer a swing producer, and keeping ‘spare capacity’ incurs a cost without commensurate benefits.

For India, this is a favourable situation, given our dependence on imports, and the fact that our imports are going to increase.

Will new sanctions-related risks emerge?

Amid the US-Iran conflict, the US initially tried to change the status quo in the Persian Gulf using kinetic means, and has failed to achieve its originally declared objectives. Therefore, it will increasingly rely on non-kinetic means, meaning sanctions.

It is mostly the US and Western nations which impose sanctions. While most non-Western governments don’t recognise American or unilateral sanctions, corporations have to contend with the reality of American centrality to the global financial system and have to plan and act accordingly. If I am a large oil company, I have global operations and require access to the international financial markets. I cannot afford to run afoul of US sanctions. RIAC has done significant work on US sanctions, and readers should review their papers on the subject.

Russia and Iran will continue to be at the receiving end of these sanctions, which will be periodically used as leverage, over sellers as well as buyers. Given the surplus of oil in the world market, the US will have greater freedom of action than in the past, and sanctions will have a greater impact on oil exporters.

Material 2

Russia, India, and China Forging a New Eurasian Energy Architecture

What strategies will oil producers and buyers adopt to manage geopolitical risks?

Historically, India has invested in overseas oil and gas fields since the early 2000s, to reduce the financial exposure to high oil prices. However, over the past decade, outbound acquisitions by Indian oil companies have virtually come to a halt. This could have been due to the loud and public signalling by the Indian government regarding renewable energy and green technologies. Most of the Indian oil industry is owned by the government, and if your largest shareholder has decided that oil is on the way out, a professional manager is unlikely to stick his neck out and go for a major acquisition.

Since 2019, Indian policymakers have pushed aggressively for electric vehicles, including support for manufacturing and other subsidies. However, penetration remains low at less than 5% for cars and 10% for two-wheeled vehicles. This is the share of EVs in total vehicle sales over the last few months – the actual stock of EVs as a segment of the vehicle population will be lower. This is perhaps the lowest penetration of EVs for any major automotive market. Unless the issues related to the supply of critical minerals, including rare earth magnets, and China’s dominance of the supply chain are addressed, adoption will lag.

The other way in which India is trying to deal with high oil prices is by aggressively pushing for biofuels – ethanol which can be blended with petrol. This is a faulty strategy, as it co-opts agricultural land in order to grow cheap fuel. The ‘savings’ from importing less oil are illusory, as India ends up importing more oilseeds and pulses – crops which have been supplanted by biofuels. Crops used for ethanol production – sugarcane and maize – are also water intensive, and India remains the most water-stressed among the major economies. Considering these factors, my view is that ethanol is a less efficient solution to the oil question, and is unlikely to be a viable alternative.

Quote 3

In summary, India has no options regarding hydrocarbons – the dependence on imported oil is not going to change. The best bet for India would be to revive investments in overseas oil, and to ensure that new reserves keep reaching the market.

A well supplied oil market is the reason why the US-Iran war didn’t become an enormous energy and economic shock. As an oil buyer, India should invest to make sure it remains so.

Valdai Discussion Club

Material 4

Eurasia’s Infrastructure— An Indian Perspective

Material 5

Fyodor Lukyanov: Russia and India Will Never Pose a Threat to Each Other

Financial sovereignty has gradually moved from specialists’ attention to the forefront of strategic economic discussions. Over the past decade, BRICS countries have made substantial progress in developing alternative settlement mechanisms, expanding the use of national currencies in bilateral trade, and strengthening institutional frameworks for financial cooperation. These achievements are tangible and significant.

Yet, as the transformation of the global economy continues, new priorities are emerging. The structure of cross-border economic activity has changed. While interstate and corporate transactions remain vital, a growing share of cross-border payments now involve individuals: tourists, students, medical travelers, remote workers, freelancers, and small entrepreneurs. Importantly, these actors are not only beneficiaries but drivers of economic integration.

The existing international financial architecture was designed in a different era and for different purposes. Serving the global economy, it has been primarily focused on large-scale institutional and trade-related flows. Its retail dimension—money transfers of people moving across borders—has received far less attention.

This gap is becoming increasingly relevant for BRICS.

With nearly half of the world’s population and a growing share in global GDP, BRICS countries have both the opportunity and incentive to extend financial integration to reach ordinary citizens.

The task is to complement existing systems with new mechanisms that would comply with contemporary human mobility and economic exchange.

Why the Present International Financial Infrastructure Is No Longer Fully Effective

The international payment systems that dominate today were developed during the period of unipolarity and relative geopolitical stability. They have facilitated decades of global economic growth. However, the world has changed. Emerging economies now account for a significantly larger share of global production, consumption, and trade. New economic corridors have appeared across Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Cross-border transactions have become more varied. Alongside traditional corporate financial flows, there is a substantial volume of citizen-to-citizen and citizen-to-business transactions. A student paying tuition abroad, a tourist purchasing services in another country, a freelancer receiving payment from an overseas client are not marginal financial activities; these money transfers amount to hundreds of billions of dollars annually and involve hundreds of millions of people. However, individuals often face practical difficulties in getting access to their domestic financial resources while traveling or doing business abroad. These difficulties are a natural consequence of a system that no longer fully aligns with the realities of a multipolar and highly mobile global economy.

Meanwhile, recent technological developments have demonstrated that many of these difficulties can be overcome. National payment systems such as Russia’s MIR, India’s UPI, China’s digital payment ecosystems, and Brazil’s PIX have proven efficient and secure for large-scale retail payments processed within domestic contexts. What is lacking is a framework for connecting these national systems across borders in a seamless and user-friendly manner.

Some digital platforms demonstrate high technical feasibility for cross-border transactions. For example, while staying in the United Arab Emirates, users of the Russian Yandex application can access transportation services abroad with payments processed through their domestic accounts in Russia and currency conversion occurring automatically in the background. This shows that the technological barriers to broader integration are much lower than is often assumed. The challenge is not technological but institutional: it lies in the lack of agreement on common standards, settlement procedures, and governance mechanisms.

From States to Citizens’ Financial Connectivity: The Rationale for a BRICS Card

BRICS countries’ financial cooperation has been focused on state-level issues: local-currency trade settlements, alternative payment messaging systems, reserve diversification, and development finance. These efforts are essential and should continue, but further integration may require an additional focus—one that would bring the benefits of financial cooperation directly to citizens. This is where the idea of a BRICS Card becomes relevant.

The rationale is straightforward. Economic integration is sustained not by governments alone but also by millions of daily interactions between individuals: tourists spending money, students paying for accommodation, entrepreneurs purchasing services, workers sending remittances. When these interactions are hindered by financial friction, the full potential of economic integration remains unrealized.

A practical response to this challenge would be the creation of a common BRICS payment ecosystem centered on interoperable national payment systems and a shared BRICS Card or digital wallet framework.

Such an ecosystem would not seek to replace national currencies, nor would it require a supranational central bank. It would enable citizens of participating countries to access their domestic financial resources when traveling or conducting business across the BRICS space, using local currencies and domestic banking relationships. A BRICS Card would be the visible, user-friendly instrument that makes this connectivity tangible.

The core principle is interoperability, not uniformity. Each participating country would retain full control over its monetary policy, banking regulation, and financial supervision. The common layer would handle the automatic conversion, settlement, and clearing of transactions according to agreed rules. For an individual, using a BRICS Card would be similar to using a domestic payment card at home—familiar, convenient, and predictable.

This approach has several advantages: it is built on existing infrastructure rather than requiring costly new systems; it respects national sovereignty while enhancing connectivity; and it focuses on practical utility rather than geopolitical symbolism. The BRICS Card is not a political statement; it is a practical tool.

Potential Benefits for Key Economic Sectors

A common payment mechanism embodied in a BRICS Card could have positive effects for further growth and smooth operation of several sectors.

Tourism and Business Travel. BRICS countries include some of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and major sources of outbound tourism. A BRICS Card would facilitate seamless payment access for travelers, reducing administrative burdens and making travel more convenient, potentially encouraging greater flows of visitors within the BRICS space.

International Education. Thousands of students from BRICS countries study in other BRICS nations. Tuition fees, living expenses, and family remittances all require cross-border payment instruments. A unified BRICS Card would simplify the necessary procedures for students and educational institutions alike.

Medical Travel. Healthcare services are an increasingly important area of cooperation, with patients traveling to specialized clinics across BRICS countries. At moments when financial certainty is particularly important, having a reliable BRICS Card that provides direct and reliable access to domestic funds would be a tangible benefit.

Digital Services and Freelancing. The growth of remote work and digitally delivered services has created new opportunities for professionals to offer their skills across borders. A BRICS Card would reduce friction for these workers, allowing them to focus on their activities rather than on payment logistics.

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). For smaller businesses, international expansion is often complicated by payment-related challenges. A BRICS Card would lower these barriers, making it easier for SMEs to access customers and partners in other BRICS countries, thereby broadening the base of economic participation.

Existing Foundations for Creating a BRICS Card

The creation of a BRICS Card would not require a single dramatic leap. A phased approach is both more realistic and more likely to succeed.

The initial stage could embrace tourism and business travel among a limited number of participating countries, and be based on the use of existing national payment systems and bilateral agreements on settlement procedures. The BRICS Card could first be issued as a co-branded card linked to national systems like MIR, UPI, or PIX. The next stage could expand to include educational payments and medical services. Later stages could incorporate digital commerce, freelancing, and small-business transactions.

The technical foundation for this already exists. Russia’s MIR system, India’s UPI, China’s digital payment platforms, Brazil’s PIX—are all proven technologies capable of handling large volumes of transactions securely and efficiently. The task is to establish common technical standards, agree on settlement rules, and develop a governance framework that would ensure transparency, security, and consumer protection for the BRICS Card.

There is also the necessary institutional foundation for issuing and operating a BRICS Card. The New Development Bank has accumulated ample experience in facilitating multilateral financial cooperation. Commercial banks with cross-border operations are increasingly active in BRICS markets.

A BRICS Card would not need to be exclusive. It could operate alongside existing international payment networks, offering an additional opportunity for those who would like to use it. The goal is not to create a closed system but to expand the range of available options, thereby enhancing consumer choice and financial resilience.

Addressing Challenges and Potential Concerns

Issuing and operating a BRICS Card is a challenging task that may naturally raise concerns.

Technological feasibility. As noted above, the necessary technology already exists in the form of national payment systems that process billions of transactions annually. The missing element is not new technology but agreement on interoperability standards—a matter of coordination, not invention.

Regulatory and legal harmonization. Different countries have different rules regarding banking, data protection, anti-money laundering, and consumer rights. These differences are real but manageable. International payment systems have successfully navigated such differences for decades. The same principles of mutual recognition and common minimum standards could apply to the BRICS Card.

Geopolitical considerations. Some BRICS members face sanctions or other external restrictions. Others do not. The BRICS Card would be designed as a voluntary, complementary layer of infrastructure. It would not require countries to choose between existing and new systems. Participation would be based on mutual benefit, not political alignment.

Trust and security. Any payment system must be reliable, transparent, and secure. This requires robust governance, clear dispute resolution mechanisms, and strong data protection. BRICS countries already have regulatory institutions capable of providing such oversight for the BRICS Card. The challenge is to coordinate them effectively.

None of these concerns is insurmountable. They are the same types of challenges that every successful international payment network has faced and overcome. What is required is sustained dialogue and a willingness to find practical solutions.

The proposal for a BRICS Card is not a grand geopolitical declaration. It is a practical response to a real and growing need. The world has changed. Patterns of human mobility and cross-border economic activity have diversified. Financial infrastructure must evolve accordingly—not through confrontation with existing systems, but through addition of new, complementary mechanisms.

The BRICS Card as an new mechanism would not replace national currencies, challenge monetary sovereignty, or seek to undermine any existing financial network. It would simply make life easier for hundreds of millions of people: students, tourists, medical travelers, freelancers, entrepreneurs acting across the BRICS space.

The technological base is available. The economic rationale is clear. The institutional foundations are already being laid. What remains is the political will to move forward—not in opposition to anything, but in commitment to the shared interest in deeper, more inclusive, and more practical economic integration.

For BRICS, which collectively represents nearly half of humanity, taking this step would be a natural progression from trade settlements to human connectivity. That is what economic integration is ultimately about.

The term ‘collective West’, widely used in Russia, is rarely employed in the West itself, except perhaps when discussing Russian political thinking. What’s commonly heard, however, is the long-running debate over what the West actually is and that discussion has continued in philosophy and politics since at least the 18th century.

The concept has never had a fixed definition, even among those who are supposedly part of it so instead, the West has usually been defined in opposition to something else. At different times, that “other” has been Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy, the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world, or even Germany, which was once regarded by some as alien to the European spirit.

Russia has frequently occupied the same role, albeit there have been periods when Russia was considered part of the Western community, but this generally happened when Western Europe’s great powers needed the support of a major ally against one of their own rivals, and once that purpose had been served, Russia was once again treated as an outsider.

There was also a longstanding debate over the place of the New World, given North America was, geographically and culturally, the West par excellence, yet it simultaneously presented itself as both the heir to European civilization and its challenger. Whether the United States belonged to the same historical and ideological community as Europe remained an open question for generations and for much of this period, conflict within what later became known as the West was intense and almost continuous.

The political West, as we understand it today, is therefore a relatively recent creation, which emerged only after the Second World War.

The defeat and division of Germany removed the principal source of conflict within Europe that had dominated the previous three centuries when Germany itself was confined within strict political limits. At the same time, Western Europe’s dramatic decline following two catastrophic world wars enabled the United States to assume leadership of the Atlantic community and finally, the Soviet Union, at the height of its military and political power, provided a common external threat around which the alliance could unite, and this was how the ‘collective West’ came into being.

During the Cold War it was defined by opposition to Moscow and after the Soviet collapse, it transformed itself into the self-appointed manager of the international order, assuming that its dominance would continue indefinitely, but the erosion of the liberal world order, which began during the first decade of this century and accelerated dramatically by the mid-2020s, has challenged that assumption. Western Europe, as the more vulnerable half of the Atlantic partnership, has been forced to redefine both its identity and its purpose.

The necessary Russian threat

The reasons behind the weakening of the post-Cold War West are well known, and include the disappearance of bipolarity, the rise of new centers of power, America’s strategic shift towards the Indo-Pacific, Washington’s growing focus on competition with China, while the fragmentation produced by the end of the liberal globalization era have all undermined the foundations of the Atlantic order.

An alliance designed for the realities of the mid-20th century no longer corresponds to those of the 21st and previous American presidents hinted that Western Europe could no longer expect the relationship to continue unchanged, however, Trump merely said so openly, and began reshaping it accordingly. Brussels was slow to recognize the implications, but it has now largely done so.

It’s far too early to write the obituary of the Atlantic alliance because the ties linking both sides of the ocean remain exceptionally strong, and their shared interests are substantial, but the West is undergoing yet another transformation. It has done so before, and it will do so again.

This brings us back to Ukraine, as the United States is reducing its direct role in European affairs, seeking a position that preserves strategic influence while avoiding responsibility for the continent’s security. Western Europe must therefore assume greater responsibility for its own defense, while, at the same time, it needs a new political narrative capable of holding the half-continent together.

An external threat provides exactly that, and Russia has become the ideal instrument.

Over the past four years, the perception of a growing Russian threat has justified NATO’s expansion to include formerly neutral countries and it has enabled Brussels to sever most economic ties and virtually all political relations with Moscow. Confrontation with Russia has become the organizing principle of both Western European foreign policy and, increasingly, domestic politics and physical barriers and new political ‘curtains’ are once again dividing Europe from Russia.

The next step, however, requires something more ambitious, the institutional consolidation of Western Europe around an explicitly anti-Russian agenda, echoing the mature Cold War.

There are, however, two serious obstacles. The first is that, despite an intense ideological campaign, Western European governments haven’t succeeded in convincing their populations that Russia represents an existential threat comparable to the Soviet Union and attempts, particularly under President Biden, to revive the narrative of the ‘free world’ confronting tyranny have largely failed.

Fear of Russia can be cultivated in some countries, but not everywhere. It’s difficult, for example, to persuade Spaniards that a Russian invasion is a realistic prospect and even in Germany, where official rhetoric has become increasingly alarmist, public skepticism remains widespread.

The second problem is that militarization develops its own internal logic. Using military preparedness as a means of promoting national unity and economic revival inevitably creates pressure for the moral and political mobilization of society and eventually, passive public support is no longer enough, but active participation is required.

As the old theatrical saying goes, a gun hanging on the wall in the first act must eventually fire, but nowhere in Western Europe is there a public eager to fight a war. Governments can’t simply compel people to embrace such a role, while re-educating entire societies would take decades, and even then success would be far from guaranteed and this is where Ukraine assumes a new role.

The Ukrainian leadership, determined to continue fighting Russia until its maximalist objectives are achieved, is effectively turning the country into a mercenary force for the wider West. It has embraced the role that Western Europe itself is unwilling to perform in fighting Russia directly and inflicting the greatest possible damage upon it.

That, however, is only part of the story and the other is the drone revolution, which is fundamentally altering the relationship between technology and manpower, as precision strike capabilities increasingly compensate for shortages of personnel.

Paradoxically, this seemingly technical development may prove to be one of the conflict’s most important political consequences.

RT

How realistic are the current prospects for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, and why is Europe emerging as the principal source of uncertainty? In an interview with the Die Weltwoche, Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, examines the dynamics of the ongoing confrontation, the positions of its key stakeholders, and the factors that continue to hinder progress towards a political resolution.

The interview is available via this link.

In an article titled “Eyes Wide Shut” published two years ago, I outlined twenty challenges that had brewed up and taken shape in Europe by the third year of the conflict in Ukraine. All of them, congested withing a focal point in time and space, structurally created an existential crisis in today’s Europe. The EU politicians concluded that the only recepie against it was the escalation of hostilities and—lately—direct involvement in the war against Russia.

They have been able to cope with some secondary challenges. For example, with France’s direct participation and involvement of the Viginum state agency, Brussels secured a favorable outcome of elections in Romania, Hungary, and Armenia, clamped down on European protests (at least for now), and, exploiting some of Donald Trump’s idiosyncrasies, managed to avoid a rapid collapse of the U.S.-Europe relations, letting them on a path of slow degradation.

The remaining challenges have definely aggravated. Europe has so far failed to revitalize its military-industrial complex; over 60 percent (in quantitative terms) of its weapons and military equipment still comes from the United States, with the costs amounting to a quarter of the EU budget (about €41 bn). European (to be precise, German) industry is shrinking: the automotive industry, once the pride of Germany, is cutting workforce and reducing production. Despite diplomatic efforts, Brussels has not overcome the crisis in relations with China. It has failed to completely abandon Russian energy imports, and what it has replaced by other sources comes at double or even triple price, with raw materials shipped through third countries or in circumvention of Europe’s own sanctions.

Supporting the Ukrainian regime is conctantly consuming more and more effort and resources. According to rough estimates, During 2022-2025 European countries collectively as well as within the EU framework provided about €170 bn of direct aid to Ukraine. The EU was greatly helped by the U.S., which donated a total of $106 bn, including $33.6 bn in monetary assistance. Now that Trump has slashed American assistance to Ukraine and Europe has to support Kiev all by itself, it is said to be  spending about €90 bn on military supplies in 2026-2027 or even €70 bn during 2026.

The EU’s monetary support strategy is determined exclusively by Paris, Berlin, Brussels, together with adjacening London. And this quartet wants all 27 EU countries to chip in. Tensions between EU states are more than likely in the near future, especially between those who ignore the Maastricht standards (gross debt of no more than 60 percent of GDP—France, Italy, and Germany are among the most developed European economies violating this criteria) and those who at least try to comply with them. Poland is among the latter.

Poland and other ‛New Europeans’ whose economy is not so grossly credit-strapped—Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria (Sweden too)—are invited to foot the bill for further support of Ukraine. This, in fact, is tantamount to cannibalizing their credit rating in the EU’s interests in order to achieve the foreign-policy and military goals set by Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and London.

It is doubtful that Poland, which has long been seeking a special role in the EU, will agree to bow.

A ‘happy alliance’ of Poland and Ukraine looked unnatural from the very beginning, given the complexity of shared history. Besides tough relations in the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were many instances of mutual antagonism in the 20th century, ranging from clashes between Lvov Poles and the army of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Volyn massacre, to decisive actions of the Polish border guards and Armed Forces to eliminate the OUN-UPA underground as part of Operation Vistula (when compared to the Russian NKVD/MGB forces, the Poles took much less time to wipe out the OUN underground groups.)

Despite the Polish authorities’ ostentatious solidarity with Kiev since 2022, Polish politicians have not forgotten or dropped their painful reminiscences. Polish politicians most likely still remember the three partitions of Poland. And the Poles seem to have much to say about this not only to the heirs of the Russian Empire but also to the heirs of Prussia and Austria. Similarly entangled are today’s relations between Poland and Germany, as borne out by the disputes about WWII reparations that flare up every year.

Poland’s historical traumas urge it to pursue an active policy in Europe in order to secure its special role as a buffer between the West and the East, no matter what happens in the continent in the future. Is this not an opportunity for Russia to seize? Two years ago, I have already speculated about the hypothetical prospects for Russia-Poland interaction amid the deepening conflict with Europe. The situation has only become even more vivid since then.

As Polish President Navrotsky and the Kiev leadership brawl over the glorification of Bandera, returning each other’s high state awards, dissatisfaction with Ukraine policy is brewing among ordinary Poles. To some, this may seem just a political game, but inside the Polish establishment some may take the Polish-Ukrainian split — while being strong-armed to pay for the Ukrainian strategies conceived by Brussels, Berlin, and Paris—quite seriously.

Let us engage in foreign policy speculations, and at least suggest to try to establish a confidential ‛second track’ of communication between the Russian and Polish expert communities or even between the relevant foreign policy operators from both ends in order to discuss not simply the post-war fate of Ukraine and the Ukrainian part of Kresy Wschodnie (Eastern Borderlands), but rather Poland’s key role in the post-war European Union?

Despite the current antagonisms between Russia and Poland, our historical experience and great-power (albeit from a long time ago) legacy allow us to at least assume that the Polish leadership is capable of exercising a kind of weird rationalism, looking for long-term benefits.

As I have noted in my earlier publications, once the conflict is settled, Poland could become a natural and influential hub for the supply of goods and energy resources from Eurasia to Western Europe, a tool for influencing Brussels that continues to disregard Poland’s fundamental interests and its’ ‘politics of the past’ by dragging Warsaw into an unnatural interaction with Kiev.

Sergei Karaganov now and again speaks about the need to deliver a preemptive nuclear strike on the NATO logistics center in Rzeszow. This indeed may have a purely military effect. But perhaps it would be more prudent to talk informally with influential Polish counterparts and discuss Uktraine’s post-conflict reconstruction and Poland’s security against crime? The latter issue is becoming particularly relevant in the context of the EU’s declared and intended deportation of Ukrainian migrants in 2027.

And after all, the Polish leadership and the Polish people are unlikely to be tempted by the prospect of becoming the next frontier in opposing Russia after Ukraine, as the European media often claim. Leading European powers have always been artful masters of throwing other countries under the bus while avoiding their own costs. (albeit, this never ended well for them, yet for some reason each generation of European “strategists” consider themselves smarter than their predecessors). These informal talks could also be used to discuss, hypothetically of cource, Europe’s post-conflict politics and economy, as well as Warsaw’s special role in determining Western European affairs, which in the long term can bring Warsaw more benefits than Brussels’s annual subsidies.

Knowing the Poles’ deeply rooted hostility towards Russia, and, worse still, utter mutual distrust, anyone would say that this is a utopian idea. Fair enough, though there is certain vital issue worth considering.

We are living not just in time of geopolitical instability but of a tectonic shift of the world order, with completely new relationships rapidly emerging and old constructs becoming obsolete. In times like this, unanticipated interests may coincide and very strange, albeit situational, alliances may emerge.

The national interests of Poland and Russia, say the parties might agree to deescalate against each other, may prove to be more concurring and complementary to each other than it might seem at first—ideologized and exalted—glance.

Western narratives portray Russia as isolated, desperate, and nearing an internal collapse. This is not true. Moscow has shifted to a sustainable attrition strategy in Ukraine, NATO’s pressure tactics have backfired, and the U.S.’s strategic distraction in the Middle East has left Europe dangerously exposed. China holds unique mediation leverage—yet squanders it through underdeveloped communication mechanisms and unaddressed credibility gaps. The next two years will show whether the world fragments further into an armed rivalry or pivots towards peaceful coexistence. The choice demands more than rhetorical gestures—and time is not on Europe’s side.

A Misread Signal

When The Economist recently splashed Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko across its cover under the headline “The Man Who Would Change Russia,” Western analysts quickly framed his interview as evidence of the Kremlin’s teetering on the brink—besieged by war fatigue, elite infighting, and the public’s weariness to sacrifice. Melnichenko did indeed strike a sombre note, warning against Russia’s future of an “austere self-sufficiency” or “vulnerable dependency.” He advocated for a new generation of state administrators and a shift away from hyper-centralized governance.

But to read this as a death knell for the current Russian administration is to mistake a weathervane for a storm.

Melnichenko’s remarks may reflect his personal anxiety, a collective signal from Russia’s business magnates, or even a deliberate trial balloon floated with the Kremlin’s approval to test Western reactions. What is certain is that the Kremlin faces genuine pressure—domestic and external. Yet pressure is not paralysis. And Western media, in their eagerness to prophesy Russia’s collapse, have systematically misread the strategic calculus that actually drives Moscow’s decision-making. An establishment under stress is not one in retreat.

The Battlefield Reality: Misreading Tactical Harassment as Strategic Reversal

The first and most dangerous Western illusion concerns Ukraine’s supposed battlefield momentum. Headlines trumpet Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russian territory—hitting refineries, supply depots, and even civilian energy infrastructure. These raids are spectacular, psychologically unsettling for Russian citizens, and technologically impressive. But they are tactical harassment, not strategic reversal.

A sceptic might object: Ukraine has reclaimed significant territory since 2023 and inflicted measurable damage on Russia’s rear areas. That’s true, but reclaiming territory and holding it against a mobilized Russian army with superior artillery and manpower are two different things. Territorial gains without attrition superiority are ephemeral. The West has mistaken YouTube footage of drone strikes for operational momentum.

Basic military logic dictates that cross-border raids, however audacious, do not alter frontline dynamics. Russian forces continue their slow but steady advance in eastern and southern Ukraine, grinding through defense lines with the relentless weight of superior artillery and manpower.

Worse still, Ukrainian strikes have given Moscow a legal justification for escalation.

Over the past two weeks, the Kremlin seems to have abandoned the euphemistic term ‘special military operation,’ with official spokespeople now explicitly referring to it as a ‘full-scale war.’ This semantic shift is quite meaningful: it signals expanded targeting, broader conscription, and end of self-imposed restraint. Every Ukrainian drone that hits Russian soil brings Russia-NATO confrontation closer to an all-out conflict that Europe is not prepared to sustain.

Meanwhile, NATO’s Group of the Willing—assembled to funnel weapons, intelligence, and training to Kyiv—has fundamentally miscalculated. From Moscow’s perspective, this conflict has always touched a core national security red line: NATO’s eastward expansion into Ukraine would erase Russia’s remaining strategic buffer and place offensive missiles within minutes of its major cities. Having invested vast human, economic, and strategic resources, Russia cannot retreat as it would equate to a collapse of its great-power status. The West’s incremental pressure has not forced compromise: it has repeatedly pushed Moscow to double down, consolidate domestic support, and enhance its countermeasures.

The Strategic Calculus: Why Europe Will Break Before Russia Does

The second pillar of Russia’s strategy that is often overlooked in the West is that Moscow has abandoned the pursuit of quick victory and embraced a protracted war of attrition designed to exhaust Europe’s economic, social, and political resilience.

Three facts underpin this grim calculus:

First, following the official escalation to a ‘full-scale war,’ Russia has launched a national conscription drive and is deploying large quantities of advanced heavy weaponry: Soviet-era stockpiles, newly produced systems, and—increasingly—Iranian and North Korean-supplied munitions. Russia’s military-industrial complex has shifted to wartime footing, and its economy, while battered, has been reoriented to bypass Western sanctions through alternative trade corridors with China, India, Turkey, and Central Asian states.

Second, Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian energy and commodities has turned anti-Russian sanctions into a self-defeating exercise. The numbers are stark: German industrial production fell 3.8% year-over-year in Q2 2026, EU natural gas storage is at 58% capacity compared to 74% at the same point in 2023, and inflation across the Eurozone remains above 5.5%, with food and energy prices still climbing. Social unrest is spreading from Germany’s factory floors to France’s streets: recent protests in Lyon and Marseille drew over 40,000 participants demanding reduced military aid to Ukraine. The cost of subsidizing Kyiv’s war effort, securing alternative energy supplies, and maintaining domestic social cohesion is rising exponentially. European leaders speak of resolve, but their publics are increasingly asking: “At what price, and for how long?”

Third, the U.S.—long the backbone of NATO’s deterrent posture—has become strategically entangled elsewhere. Under the Trump administration, U.S.-Iranian tensions have escalated, diverting vast military and diplomatic resources to the Middle East. Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at the 2025 Munich Security Conference and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2026 address have already shaken European confidence in unconditional American backing. With U.S. attention now split between the Persian Gulf and the Pacific, Europe faces a growing strategic isolation that its leaders are reluctant to admit publicly.

The result is a dangerous gap between Western strategic ambitions and practical capabilities. Europe talks of defeating Russia, but it lacks the energy independence, industrial capacity, and unified political will to sustain a multi-year attrition campaign. Russia, by contrast, has structured its entire state apparatus around endurance. In a long war, endurance often trumps firepower—and Europe’s clock is ticking faster than Moscow’s.

The Alternative Path: China’s Mediation and Untapped Potential

Amid this escalating standoff, where both sides seem locked in a zero-sum mindset, alternative approaches to conflict resolution are often dismissed as naive or self-serving. Yet one major power—China—can offer a fundamentally different path rooted in its traditional culture of harmony, tolerance, and win-win cooperation.

An ancient Chinese saying advises: “Taking a step back opens up boundless horizons.” This maxim advocates compromise over non-principled disputes. It does not imply moral ambiguity or ignorance of injustice; rather, it reflects a strategic tradition that values long-term stability over short-term victory. China’s consistent stance of promoting peace talks and mediation in resolving the Ukraine conflict stems directly from this tradition.

In practical terms, China has three unique advantages as a potential mediator: 1) it maintains normal economic and diplomatic ties with both Russia and Ukraine; 2) it has refused to impose unilateral sanctions, preserving its credibility as a neutral actor; 3) it is the only major power capable of engaging all parties—Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Kyiv—on a relatively equal footing.

However, China’s mediation potential is hampered by two persistent challenges—both of which are better understood as unrealized assets rather than fatal flaws.

First, the underleveraged communication mechanism. Beijing’s calls for peace are timely but fragmented, lacking the sophisticated global communication infrastructure that Western nations have built over decades. Chinese spokespeople often rely on diplomatic clichés that fail to resonate with foreign publics, while Western media continues to frame China’s neutrality as either pro-Russian appeasement or self-interested opportunism. This is not a deficit of substance—China’s peace narrative is coherent and principled—but a deficit of delivery. It is a fixable communication challenge, not a fatal flaw.

Second, the credibility problem. Sceptical Western observers will reasonably ask: Doesn’t China benefit from a weakened Russia that has to rely on Beijing for trade, finance, and diplomatic support? Let me be blunt: yes, China gains some short-term advantages from Russia’s isolation: cheaper energy imports, expanded market access, and a strategic counterweight to U.S. influence. To deny this would be dishonest. But these are tactical gains that purchase strategic losses: a fractured Europe, a nuclear neighbour driven into a corner, and a global ‘rules-based order’ decaying into armed rivalry.

No competent strategist would trade long-term stability for short-term bargains. China’s interest lies in ending this war, not prolonging it. Acknowledging this openly—rather than ignoring it—would strengthen China’s credibility as an honest broker.

What would Chinese mediation look like in practice? Here is the concrete, phased pathway:

• Phase 1 (immediate):proposing a humanitarian corridor framework, jointly monitored by China, Turkey, and the UN, to evacuate civilians from active front-line areas and facilitate prisoner exchanges.
• Phase 2 (short-term):hosting back-channel Track II dialogues between retired Russian and NATO military officials in Beijing or Shanghai, focused on protocols for de-escalation and prevention of miscommunication.
• Phase 3 (medium-term):offering China as the venue for formal negotiations, conditional on a mutual ceasefire-in-place along current front lines, with international verification.
• Phase 4 (long-term):linking ceasefire to a broader European security architecture discussion, including NATO-Russia force posture agreements, arms control verification, and a roadmap for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction with multilateral financing.

This pathway transforms China from a passive bystander into an active convener—without requiring Beijing to abandon its neutral posture or impose solutions on unwilling parties.

The Root Cause: Hegemonic Competition and the Zero-Sum Trap

A step back from the tactical minutiae of the Ukraine war reveals its deep structural sources. The root cause of this conflict—and of the broader turmoil from the Middle East to the South China Sea—lies in the hegemonic competitive logic of traditional Western geopolitics. This logic assumes that major powers must suppress rivals, expand spheres of influence, and view development as a zero-sum game. Russia, it must be acknowledged, has long been both a victim and a practitioner of this very logic.

China’s modernization trajectory offers counter evidence: that a nation can achieve prosperity and national strength without suppressing others or pursuing hegemony. Its Belt and Road Initiative, however imperfect, is predicated on connectivity and shared development rather than military containment. Its diplomatic rhetoric consistently emphasises “win-win cooperation,” “inclusive coexistence,” and “common development.”

Yet rhetoric alone is insufficient. The global community is drowning in conflicts, and China can no longer remain a passive bystander. The time has come for Beijing to embrace a special mission: to systematically disseminate the vision of peaceful coexistence, to break the shackles of Western-dominated narratives, and to drive the global community towards abandoning hegemonic competition once and for all.

This will not be a short-term campaign with quick wins. It is a strategy that requires comprehensive, multidimensional, and coordinated efforts across media, academia, cultural exchanges, and multilateral institutions. It demands patience, reserve, and willingness to listen as much as to speak. But it is a transformative endeavour worthy of China’s historical stature and future aspirations.

The Choice Before Us

The Ukraine war will eventually end—on the battlefield, at a negotiating table, or through mutual exhaustion. But the bigger question will remain: What kind of world will emerge from the ashes?

One path leads towards continued division, turmoil, and the perpetuation of zero-sum rivalries—a world where major powers arm themselves against each other, regional conflicts multiply, and humanitarian catastrophes become routine.

The other path leads towards peaceful coexistence—where differences are managed through diplomacy, development is shared rather than hoarded, coercion yields to consent, and force gives way to negotiation.

The choice hinges on the strategic decisions that major powers—particularly the U.S., Russia, China, and Europe—make in the coming months and years. China has a role to play, but it cannot play it alone. Nor can it do it without confronting its own communication underdevelopment and credibility challenges.

This is not an argument for passivity. It is a call for strategic imagination—the kind that sees beyond the next artillery barrage to the architecture of a sustainable peace.

No competent strategist would trade long-term stability for short-term bargains. China’s interest lies in ending this war, not prolonging it. Acknowledging this openly—rather than ignoring it—would strengthen China’s credibility as an honest broker.

Author’s Note

Dimitri Simes, a renowned Russian American political scientist and former chairman of the Center for the National Interest, is re-entering public discourse with a new political journal, Politika, as its editor-in-chief. He has graciously invited the author to contribute to its inaugural issue due to be released this September. The observations featured above form the core of my forthcoming article, War and Peace Revisited: A Chinese Perspective on the Ukraine Conflict and New Pathways to Global Peace. Readers are invited for debate, critique, and—above all—action.

Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, has a conversation with Hasan Ünal, Professor at Başkent University in Ankara, on the Strategic Compass programme. They discuss the renewed hostilities between Iran and the United States, Russia’s gradual military advances in Ukraine, and growing calls within Russian society and the political establishment for a more forceful strategy to bring the conflict to an end, including the use of more powerful weapons and strikes against European countries supplying Ukraine.

The conversation is available via this link.

Debates on global governance are usually framed in terms of institutional collapse or systemic breakdown. However, this diagnosis misses a more subtle but far more significant symptom—its mutation. The contemporary international order is not abandoning multilateralism; rather, it is undergoing a structural transformation from within. Its formal institutions created after 1945 remain in place, but their regulatory capacity is systematically hollowed out by the very great powers that are meant to sustain them.

To understand this dynamic, we must look past the universalist rhetoric of the ‘rules-based international order.’ As Hans Morgenthau (1948) observed, the institutional architecture of multilateralism always functioned as a “Holy Alliance within the Holy Alliance”—a legal framework designed to concentrate effective power within a selective group of dominant states. Instead of establishing an impartial international arena, the global juridical order merely reproduces functional asymmetries. In this realist scheme, international law often operates fictionally (Zolo, 2000): designed as ethics to define international justice, it actually embodies the structural capacity of those who command the dominant military and economic networks, setting the rules and its boundaries.

Coercion operates simultaneously on two levels: 1) formal—through multilateral frameworks providing diplomatic cover, and 2) substantive—through weaponized interdependence that enables routine deployment of permanent coercion.

In fact, we are witnessing an inter-systemic change with the formal structures remaining intact but their regulatory substance being drained out. This change rests on the normalization of permanent coercion. Coercive practices—financial, commercial, technological, and strategic—are no longer exceptional measures used to address crises; they have become routine mechanisms of interstate competition.

Great powers no longer seek to dismantle the multilateral system; instead, they instrumentalize its central nodes. While offensive realism explains the baseline incentives for states to maximize relative power in an anarchic environment (Mearsheimer, 2001), the use of specific mechanisms of contemporary competition is rationalized by weaponized interdependence (Farrell and Newman, 2019). In a highly interconnected global economy, structural power is exercised through control of the critical infrastructure of international exchange. States that occupy central positions in global networks can monitor, exclude, or choke adversaries, transforming connectivity into an unprecedented geopolitical lever.

This distinction matters because the persistence of institutional form can easily be mistaken for the persistence of institutional function. In reality, the sustained multilateral procedures serve to conceal a deeper transformation in the distribution and exercise of power. The most significant change is not that states have stopped invoking rules, but that the rules increasingly operate within environments shaped by coercion. In this sense, multilateralism does not disappear; it becomes increasingly dependent on the structural capacities of those actors which are able to activate, suspend, or reinterpret its mechanisms.

The vectors of Structural Coercion

The shift from rule enforcement to infrastructural weaponization manifests itself across multiple domains of global governance, turning once-neutral regulatory frameworks into asymmetric instruments of pressure.

Intra-Institutional Obstruction: The WTO Appellate Body’s Paralysis

The erosion of the multilateral trading regime is vividly illustrated by the structural paralysis of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism. By unilaterally blocking the appointment of new members to the Appellate Body, the U.S. effectively dismantled the system’s second-instance adjudication (Barrueco, 2025). This means that panel reports are now stripped of legal finality.

This strategy points to the WTO’s functional hollowing out. It demonstrates how a dominant actor can utilize an international institution to serve own immediate interests, turning a multilateral framework into a defective mechanism and depriving vulnerable states of their primary legal shield against unilateralism.

Network Weaponization: Market Access and Secondary Pressures

Economic networks are now increasingly used as levers of disciplinary power in interstate competition. China’s synchronized trade restrictions on Australian exports—targeting barley, beef, wine, and coal following Canberra’s alignment with Western security demands (Ferguson, Waldron and Lim, 2023)—showcase how central nodes of value chains can be weaponized under the guise of technical or sanitary regulations. This practice is not entirely new, but its growing scale and frequency suggest a radical shift. Similarly, Beijing’s secondary supply-chain pressure against European firms linked to Lithuania (WTO, 2022) demonstrates how targeted economic insulation can be used to punish diplomatic deviations.

This dynamics has triggered a reactive institutionalization of coercion, exemplified by the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, established by Regulation 2023/2675 (European Union, 2023). The use of this instrument, designed to neutralize foreign economic pressure through legal deterrence and commercial countermeasures, proves that globalization has ceased to function as a neutral arena of exchange. It has been transformed into a highly securitized space structured by strategic chokepoints, where even major regional powers must institutionalize counter-coercive capabilities to preserve autonomy.

Sovereign Revisionism: U.S. Unilateral Tariffs

The expansion of broad-based import tariffs justified under national security exemptions (such as Sections 232 and 301 of the U.S. Trade Act) exemplifies how multilateral commitments are systematically subordinated to unilateral decisions (Mulder, 2025). When a hegemonic power perceives that the structural costs of maintaining a liberal trading order outweigh its relative gains, it expands its autonomy by redefining the boundaries of rule application. Under this logic, tariff pressures are no longer exceptional anomalies, but regular, structural mechanisms deployed to manage interstate competition and make market access a permanent lever of geopolitical coercion.

Systemic Infrastructure Exclusion: The Case of Russia

The economic and financial sanctions imposed on Russia are the pinnacle of permanent coercion exercised through control over global systemic infrastructure (Dowlah, 2025). Rather than introducing selective trade restrictions, Western powers leveraged their structural dominance in international payments by:

• freezing Russian Central Bank assets and foreign reserves;
• enforcing targeted exclusion from the SWIFT financial messaging system;
• restricting access to dollar- and euro-denominated capital markets.

From the perspective of weaponized interdependence, the global monetary sysatem functions as a perfect structural chokepoint capable of isolating a state from vital transnational flows. Here lies the core contradiction of the contemporary international legal order: while the discourse justifying these measures claims to defend the ‘rules-based order,’ the capacity to enforce them depends entirely on an asymmetrical distribution of power over global infrastructure. Normative universalism is thus being unmasked as a fiction, blurring the boundary between economic coercion and strategic warfare.

These cases reveal that institutional structural persistence coexists with operational asymmetry.

The WTO case shows how enforcement can be neutralized from within; the China-related cases illustrate the weaponization of market access and supply-chain dependence; the European response demonstrates the institutionalization of counter-coercion; and the anti-Russia sanctions regime reveal the strategic centrality of financial infrastructure.

Remarkably, coercion is exercised through the very mechanisms that sustain global interdependence.

The Transfiguration of Warfare: Coercive Unmasking

The hollowing out of rules-based multilateralism inevitably transforms the ontology of military conflicts. As institutional predictability declines, warfare abandons the long-standing requirement for universal normative legitimacy, operating as a primal tool for managing geo-economic interests (Blackwill and Harris, 2016). Historically, great powers felt compelled to drape their military interventions in the vocabulary of humanitarianism, promotion of democracy and human rights. Today, normative justifications are abandoned in favor of a brute, transparent coercive unmasking.

The U.S.’s recent coercive interventions graphically illustrate this shift. The 2026 U.S. operation to capture the Venezuelan president (Barabanov, 2026) was a direct enforcement that sidestepped multilateral mediation, even as it remains intertwined with broader methods of economic and financial pressure. Similarly, Trump’s territorial claims over strategic regions such as Greenland suggest a growing willingness to translate structural advantages into more explicit geopolitical assertions (Gupta, 2025). These developments indicate that coercion is no longer an exceptional, but increasingly consistent practice, employed across military, economic, and infrastructural domains. It signals not so much a breakdown of order as a more contested power reconfiguration, where managing transnational circulatory systems becomes the central condition for exercising power.

Furthermore, this transition signals the rise of a ‘geopolitics of flows,’ where territorial control is reconfigured around strategic nodes and global supply chains. U.S. hegemonic ambitions regarding Greenland and the escalating tensions over the Arctic do not signify a nostalgic return to 19th-century imperialism; rather, they reflect a cold calculation to control global energy routes and critical minerals. Westphalian principles, such as territorial integrity and non-intervention, are now treated by structurally dominant states as mere interpretive obstacles to be ignored whenever national vital interests prevail.

Crucially, contemporary conflict has been transfigured into an asymmetric ‘police execution’ (Zolo, 2007). Rather than serving as a legal punishment imposed for breaking a law enforced by equal sovereign states, penalties are now meted out from a position of absolute hierarchical and technological superiority. Certain actors arbitrarily assume the de facto mantle of global police forces while selectively relegating non-compliant nations to the status of ‘rogue states.’ This allows dominant powers to execute punitive actions, externalize the material and political costs of aggression, and deprive the targeted state of any effective legal protection.

In this world of weaponized connectivity, kinetic military intervention becomes the final, complementary act of an encirclement previously executed within the transnational financial and energy networks, though the boundary between these domains is increasingly difficult to sustain.

Strategic Agency without Structural Backing

The empirical vectors of permanent coercion and the transfiguration of warfare do not merely alter the geopolitical balance, they fundamentally dismantle the institutional conditions that sustain what this paper conceptualizes as strategic agency without structural backing. This analytical category theorizes the specific, calibrated modalities of international action deployed by states that lack material, military, or structural power within a system marked by profound structural asymmetries.

The Global South now faces a profound strategic dilemma: while universal multilateralism historically functioned as an asymmetric shield enabling predictable dispute mediation, the current normalization of permanent coercion reduces rules to a legal veneer, severely narrowing the room for maneuver for states lacking structural power.

Far from being a systemic anomaly, strategic agency without structural backing constitutes a rational, deliberate statecraft. It is, however, structurally conditioned by a foundational requirement: the existence of a rules-based normative framework endowed with a minimum threshold of institutional credibility and operational predictability. Under the aegis of traditional multilateralism, less powerful states—particularly in Latin America and across the Global South—consistently drew upon international law and stable multilateral fora not as abstract moral preferences, but as vital strategic resources. When international norms are perceived as relatively stable and universally applicable, weaker actors can leverage them to channel asymmetric disputes, legitimize foreign policy positions, form diplomatic coalitions, and constrain the discretionary exercise of power by hegemonic states.

This form of agency depends less on the material attributes of power than on the availability of institutional procedures permitting to partially translate legal arguments into political leverage. For states lacking control over military, financial, or technological infrastructure, multilateralism historically offered a limited but meaningful capacity for action. It did not eliminate hierarchy, but it created a procedural space where weaker actors could delay, contest, expose, or diplomatically reframe asymmetrical pressures. In this sense, international law operated not as a neutral guarantee, but as a strategic language through which vulnerable states could seek recognition, build coalitions, and raise the political costs of unilateral coercion.

The transition towards permanent coercion brings a fatal tension into this mechanism.

As great powers shift from normative compliance to selective instrumentalization and infrastructural weaponization, the universal framework is hollowed out of its substance—capacity for ordering.

Rules continue to be invoked as a superficial language of legitimation, but they no longer function as real constraints on material power. Consequently, the strategic value of multilateralism as an instrument of asymmetric insulation is drastically diminished.

The problem, therefore, is that the conditions that make weaker states’ agency effective are progressively degraded. Agency remains possible, but it becomes more reactive, more exposed, and more dependent on the actors that control the infrastructures of enforcement. Not only is the legal framework eroding, but also the fragile mediation that allowed states without structural power to transform normative claims into a diplomatic resource is no longer operative.

These observations shed light on the structural limitations of alternative institutional frameworks like BRICS. While politically potent for diplomatic coordination among revisionist and emerging economies, they cannot ensure predictability for weaker states. This also explains BRICS’s weakness, which lies not in the lack of political will, but infrastructure. Specifically, BRICS lacks:

• a unified, binding legal architecture;
• standardized and enforceable dispute-settlement mechanisms;
• independent, comprehensive control over the core global financial infrastructures.

Without autonomous payment systems, binding dispute-settlement mechanisms, and reliable mechanisms of legal coordination, alternative coalitions like BRICS may express dissatisfaction with the existing order, but they are not yet able to reproduce the stabilizing functions that made multilateralism strategically useful for weaker states.

Furthermore, the fragmentation of the Global South itself—compounded by deeply divergent levels of development and conflicting foreign policy alignments—prevents the formation of a cohesive coalition capable of anchoring a new normative regime. In this inter-systemic interregnum, the collapse of institutional predictability means that the room for maneuver for countries with strategic agency but without structural backing is squeezed, forcing weaker states into a highly volatile arena where form is entirely divorced from function.

*   *   *

The transformation of contemporary global governance cannot be adequately explained by institutional collapse or a crisis of the multilateral order. The multilateral order is undergoing a more insidious change—a functional hollowing out of its regulatory capacity from within. Formal structures persist, international law remains the nominal language of diplomacy, and institutions retain their architecture. Substantively, however, their ability to act as effective constraints on power is eroding, rendered contingent upon and subservient to the underlying power reconfiguration.

This transformation can be conceptualized as ‘permanent coercion.’ Coercion is no longer used as an exceptional tool; it is now routinely embedded in the everyday operation of multilateralism. By weaponizing critical nodes within global economic, technological, and financial networks, dominant powers have transformed interdependence into a mechanism of geopolitical discipline, stripping global governance of its normative neutrality.

What appears as the continuity of multilateralism conceals a deeper transformation—the consolidation of a structurally stratified and operationally selective order.

“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

Sun Tzu. The Art of War

China is in the process of redefining its relations with the rest of the world, with the West in particular. During the first decades of economic reform and ‘opening up’, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, China sought a “peaceful rise” within the international framework established after World War II. It avoided confrontation with the U.S. and other Western nations with strategic prudence and patience, in line with the classical Chinese maxim advocated by Deng: “Hide the force, wait for the hour.”

However, Washington preferred to pursue a policy of containment and confrontation towards China. It was launched during Donald Trump’s first presidency (2017-2020), continued during Joe Biden’s (2021-2024), and dramatically intensified during Trump’s second term. Today, Washington sees China as a rival and main threat. Accordingly, it has adopted measures to undermine China’s positions in the commercial, technological, military, and diplomatic spheres.

During Trump’s first presidency, and probably even before that, Beijing recognized that the classical strategy of “hiding the force and waiting for the hour” was no longer viable.

China became too strong, surpassing the U.S. in economic terms (if estimated by GDP at purchasing power parity) and international trade (having become the main trading partner for most countries in the world). China’s rapid development aroused envy and suspicion, ultimately making it the target of intrigues, diplomatic maneuvers, and sanctions.

But Beijing has not abandoned its strategic caution. It continues to avoid conflict whenever possible, remaining careful with its words and actions even in the face of the West’s systematic hostility. The Chinese maintain the traditional style of dealing with challenges that Henry Kissinger, in his famous book On China, described as a mix of thorough analysis, careful preparation, and attention to psychological and political factors.

One important part of the China’s preparation, which has proven decisive in 2026, was the formation of strategic oil reserves. Thanks to this, China suffers relatively little from the oil price shocks triggered by the Iran war. The country’s monetary reserves are also immense, now less exposed to confiscations and sanctions. A large part of these international reserves has been transferred by the Central Bank to commercial and public banks. In coordination with the Central Bank, these banks buy foreign currency in the foreign exchange market to avoid unwanted appreciation of the national currency. In addition, China has begun building cross-border payment systems as an alternative to Western-controlled systems, which the West uses to punish and sanction countries deemed hostile. The share of the renminbi in China’s international transactions has also grown. Its trade with Russia, for example, is now almost 100% conducted in rubles and renminbi.

Thus, China is well positioned to weather the storm unleashed by Trump during his second term. He resorted to more radical instruments against his opponent, but he has found that Beijing is now more capable of addressing international threats.

Under Xi Jinping, China appears as an adversary that knows how to defend itself with great effectiveness. Moreover, it knows the U.S. and its allies and satellites’ vulnerabilities and is ready to exploit them.

China has got the better of this confrontation with the U.S.—because of its prudence and strength, but also because of the opponent’s mistakes. Overestimating its power and having engaged itself in conflicts with Russia, China and Iran all at the same time, the U.S. has motivated the three countries for a strong alliance. And worse: it is losing on all the three fronts. The war against Iran seems to be a milestone that may prove to be the harbinger of the end of the American Empire.

Beijing not only follows a consistent strategy, but also knows how to maneuver tactically, taking advantage of the opponents’ mistakes. The Chinese follow the maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt an adversary when he is making a mistake.” There is no reliable evidence that Napoleon actually said or wrote this, but this apocryphal Western formula is entirely consistent with Chinese classical military thought, which is notably expressed by Sun Tzu in The Art of War cited in epigraph to this article.

China is changing and adapting its policies to the arising challenges, while at the same time preserving its traditional philosophy and ancient culture. It does not abandon Confucius, nor Mao Zedong. It does not cling thoughtlessly to the past, but neither does it forsake its roots.

China’s ascent, no longer peaceful but increasingly conflictive, can be expected to continue without interruption.

For citation, please use:
Kiriyanov, O.V. and Subeom, Ch., 2026. The Northern Sea Route as a Field of Deferred Russia-South Korea Cooperation. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 208–223. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-208-223

In recent years, the Northern Sea Route (NSR) has firmly established itself as one of Russia’s key long-term projects: not only a transport artery, but part of a broader Arctic policy that integrates logistics, resource exports, energy infrastructure, and the spatial development of northern territories (Presidential Decree, 2020). In this sense, the NSR is a long-term geo-economic project.

The NSR’s development is proceeding under severe external constraints, primarily sanctions, which have significantly limited opportunities for international cooperation, and increased Russia’s dependence on a limited number of partners. This increases the need for diversified external relations that can supply strategic options in the future.

In this context, the intersection of South Korean and Russian interests in the Arctic and the NSR is of special relevance. South Korea holds strong positions in maritime logistics, shipbuilding, and complex infrastructure projects. But Seoul’s cooperation with Russia has in recent years been restrained by commitment to Western sanctions.

However, reducing South Korea’s position on the NSR to the lack of practical cooperation would be an oversimplification. Since June 2025, South Korea’s new government has displayed interest in rapprochement with Russia, North Korea, and China (while maintaining the alliance with the U.S.). Notably, development of the NSR has been included in the new government’s key objectives (National Policy Tasks, 2025, p. 118).

South Korean experts and businesses are also discussing the NSR as a promising opportunity to transform global logistics and ensure South Korea’s long-term national interests. Such discussions do not displace government policy, but can serve as a basis for planning longer-term cooperation.

This article discusses how Russia-South Korea cooperation in the Arctic can be conceptualized amid the current political and economic restrictions. Particular attention is paid to the approaches of the South Korean government, experts, and businesses. We describe possible medium- and long-term ‘deferred cooperation’ between Russia and South Korea regarding the NSR, which for now would involve the development of various options and the enactment of measures to lower future transaction costs.

The Northern Sea Route in Russia’s Geo-Economic Strategy

Official Russian documents and policy increasingly describe the NSR not as a backup transportation route, but as an independent infrastructure axis. It is part of a broader strategic project, the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC), intended to become a year-round logistics artery and the shortest sea route between Europe and Asia. The TATC also includes major rivers, railways, and roads in the Arctic (Kraev, 2026).

Economically, the NSR transports energy and other resources from Russia’s Arctic, and is thus necessary for the realization of major resource-extraction projects in the region. It will complement existing global logistics corridors. And it is linked to the development of Russia’s technological and energy autonomy, including the construction and modernization of Russia’s own icebreakers and port infrastructure.

However, the NSR’s high capital intensity and its technological complexity, as well as the need for investment that is long-term and reliable, narrow Russia’s choice of partners. Sanctions have further reduced Russia’s access to Western technologies, financing, and insurance. Russia’s critically-important Arctic agenda thus needs a diversification of external partners—not for immediate project implementation, but for medium- and long-term cooperation.

South Korea could be useful here, even while maintaining its own interests.

South Korea’s Arctic Policy

Main Contours

South Korea’s polar research policy took shape later than that of other Arctic states. However, in recent decades, Seoul has transitioned from an observer to a full-fledged participant in international activities in the polar regions. Notably, South Korea’s Arctic policy combines research, economic, and diplomatic objectives, and (lacking direct access to the region) relies on international cooperation and the country’s technological advantages.

South Korea’s polar policy dates to the late 1980s, when research infrastructure and dedicated scientific institutions were created. Since the late 1990s, economic factors have intensified interest in the Arctic: South Korea’s export-oriented economy is almost entirely dependent on maritime transportation, hence the importance of new transport routes (primarily the NSR).

Since Arctic phenomena influence Korea’s climate, South Korea also has an interest in climate research there.

A key feature of South Korea’s approach is its treatment of the Arctic and Antarctic as interconnected areas of research and economic activity. South Korea focuses on areas of competitive advantage: shipbuilding, maritime logistics, polar technologies, and scientific research. By creating an icebreaker fleet and research stations, and participating in international scientific programs, South Korea has gained a firm foothold in the system of global polar cooperation (Kiriyanov, 2023).

With Seoul’s acquisition of observer status in the Arctic Council in 2013, its policy became more institutionalized. Its plans have shifted from purely scientific (international cooperation and research) to also economic (transportation, resources, and technology).

In 2022, the Law on Stimulating Activities in Polar Regions enshrined the government’s responsibility for advancing polar research, infrastructure construction, human resources, and international cooperation.

The Arctic Strategy Until 2050 was also adopted, declaring the goal of becoming a leading power in sustainable Arctic governance through participation in international climate change programs, involvement in the region’s sustainable economic development, expanded Arctic diplomacy, and development of the national research and technological base.

Finally, The Medium-Term Plan for 2023–2027 repeated those objectives, acknowledged the growing competition in the polar regions, and the need to strengthen South Korea’s position by developing the icebreaker fleet, satellite monitoring, environmentally-friendly shipping technologies, and international cooperation (Kiriyanov, 2023).

South Korea’s Arctic policy is generally pragmatic and multifaceted: scientific activity legitimizes its presence, diplomacy compensates for the lack of territorial access, and technology and logistics underlie long-term economic interests.

The NSR in the Lee Jae-Myung Government’s Strategy

The NSR is named a priority in all of South Korea’s polar laws, programs, and plans.

In 2017, at the 3rd Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, South Korean President Moon Jae-in proposed ‘Nine Bridges of Cooperation,’ including several Arctic-related areas: the NSR, shipbuilding, port development, and gas supplies (Seo, 2021, p. 184).

The new South Korean government, led by Lee Jae-myung, which came to power in June 2025, has elevated the NSR’s importance, making its development a priority—not within a regional or scientific agenda, but within South Korea’s maritime and logistics strategy.

This policy is enshrined in National Policy Task No. 56: “Creating a K-Sea Power, Leading the Era of the Northern Sea Route.” Essentially, it links the South Korean maritime industry’s future to the development of new Arctic transport routes and the creation of infrastructure supporting South Korea’s participation in the redistribution of global logistics flows.

The South Korean government is ready to start practical implementation of this project, with pilot voyages along the NSR, followed by the route’s transformation into a commercially viable corridor. To this end, the government intends to financially support national shipping companies in the construction of icebreakers and the development of technologies for transport in icy conditions (National Policy Tasks, 2025, p. 118).

The port of Busan is planned to become a key logistics hub for servicing Arctic cargo flows. There are also plans to build port facilities for containers, LNG, and oil, and to modernize port infrastructure with environmentally friendly and smart technologies. More generally, South Korea plans to increase its transport fleet’s capacity and environmental friendliness, which should enhance its competitiveness on new routes. South Korea’s strategy also emphasizes the need to intensify international cooperation through participation in global maritime forums and through partnerships in Arctic shipping. The NSR is viewed as a transport project, but also as a source of new technologies, an incentive for shipbuilding, and a source of future economic advantages (Ibid).

Yet Seoul’s plans for the NSR’s development face a dilemma. From the very beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, South Korea has supported Western sanctions on Russia, including in the Arctic. With Lee Jae-myung’s accession in 2025, rhetoric has noticeably softened, but so far without any concrete change. While Seoul is not at the forefront of Western efforts to impose new sanctions on Russia, it strictly adheres to existing ones. It is generally believed that progress in Russia-South Korea relations will be possible only if the West softens its approach to Russia, since Seoul follows its main military and political ally, the U.S.

But effective use of the NSR, lying along Russia’s coast and running through its exclusive economic zone, is impossible without Russia. Hence Seoul is seeking ways to resume cooperation with Russia on the NSR, without violating the current sanctions regime (Pak, 2026).

South Korea’s Search for New Ways to Use the NSR

The Expert and Business Perspective: Rational Caution

South Korean experts and businesses approach the Arctic and the NSR from a longer-term pragmatic perspective, weighing opportunities and risks in light of national interests.

Expert discussions, which often include government officials, tend to shift focus from the current political situation to structural changes in global logistics and energy. The NSR is seen not as requiring immediate action, but as an element in the future transformation of global maritime routes, one whose importance could increase as traditional corridors become more congested and risky.

South Korean analytical papers emphasize that the NSR is “not just the shortest route between Asia and Europe, but a strategic option capable of strengthening the stability and predictability of supplies” (Ko, 2025).

Geopolitical crises in recent years—the blocking of the Suez Canal and restrictions on the Panama Canal—have exposed the vulnerability of even a well-developed logistics system.

However, in discussing the NSR, experts and business do not oppose the government’s position. Rather, the products of such ‘ideas incubators’ are intended only for later implementation. Strategic interest in the NSR is thus maintained within the boundaries of current government policy.

Today, the debate is around which region and port should be primary beneficiaries of the new strategy and how the new plans should be implemented. Since the NSR’s inclusion in Lee Jae-myung’s list of 123 development priorities, competition for connection to the NSR has risen between South Korea’s regions and ports, several of which have proposed their own (Kiriyanov, 2026a).

Pragmatically, the South Koreans acknowledge that the NSR should be tapped through cooperation between private corporations of Russia and South Korea, as they are less dependent on geopolitical factors. South Korea’s large corporations have shown little enthusiasm so far, content in their reliance upon standard routes. But as global warming extends the period of Arctic navigability, and the vulnerability of the Suez Canal and other routes becomes clear, the NSR’s advantages in shipping to Europe will force even the large corporations to turn towards it (Ma, 2026).

Furthermore, although the South Korean government and businesses constantly claim their independence from each other, there are numerous mechanisms for ensuring the alignment of their positions. The government’s inclusion of the NSR in the official list of key development objectives has pushed companies to become more active. Yet South Korean businesses continue to strictly comply with anti-Russian sanctions (Park, 2026).

While both experts and major companies view the NSR as a strategic opportunity, they emphasize that its use entails significant risks, primarily sanctions against Russia and against those who cooperate with it. Financing is especially vulnerable.

There is also the political risk of sudden international developments, including projects’ suspension by either Russian or South Korean authorities, especially if South Korea’s conservatives—who traditionally give unconditional priority to the alliance with the U.S.—return to power. These risks necessitate additional legal guarantees and special investment protection regimes.

The South Koreans also note inherent limitations of the NSR. Arctic conditions require enhanced ice-class standards, expanded insurance coverage, regular personnel training, and exchange of meteorological data. This raises operating costs and makes the NSR more complex compared to traditional routes. All of this is compounded by the shortage of specialized vessels, limited capacity of ports located along the NSR, the need to develop modern river-sea cargo handling facilities, and other infrastructure deficiencies (EY Report, 2026).

On the whole, South Korean experts and big businesses view the NSR not only as a promising alternative corridor, but also as politically, financially, and operationally uncertain, requiring a cautious and phased approach.

The New Leadership’s Tentative Approach

Despite all the risks, difficulties, and limitations, South Korea is already taking steps towards realizing its NSR goals.

In the second half of 2025, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries began consultations with domestic companies on staging a trial voyage by a South Korean container ship from Busan to Rotterdam via the NSR. In January 2026, the Ministry announced preparations for negotiations with Russia on the NSR trial voyage, with consultations scheduled to take place in the first half of 2026. To organize the passage of a 3,000 TEU container ship, on 27 April 2026 a bidding contest was announced among South Korean shipping companies ready to operate in Arctic conditions. The winner was announced in the middle of May 2026. Busan-based PanStar Line Dot won the contest and will receive government support of up to 4 billion wons (about $2.3 million) for the construction or retrofitting of an icebreaker, along with port fee exemptions. To coordinate the project, a headquarters involving ten government agencies has been established (Kiriyanov, 2026с).

The project aims to test the NSR in practice, accumulate Arctic shipping experience, and check the economic and technical feasibility of large-scale repeat shipments (Kim, 2026; KMN, 2026). The South Korean authorities have not yet articulated how exactly they would like Russia to assist the trial voyage, but they are likely to request right-of-passage, navigation information, and a commitment to provide supplies and repairs as necessary.

South Korean bulk carriers have sailed through the NSR five times, but its container ships have never done so. The South Koreans’ activity is largely instigated by the passage of a Chinese container ship through the NSR in 2025, and by Beijing’s overall increased activity in the Arctic (Kiriyanov, 2026b).

Acting Minister of Oceans and Fisheries Kim Sung-beom has confirmed readiness to resolve the sanctions issue: “Russia requires that we receive permission to transit the portion of the NSR that passes through Russia’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone. In this regard, it is important to establish cooperation with the relevant [Russian] authorities. However, since our country is also participating in Western sanctions imposed against Russia, we plan to find a mutually acceptable solution. We are preparing negotiations with Russian authorities in the first half of this year” (Yoon, 2026). This indicates not an intent to lift sanctions, but rather to find ways around sanctions-related difficulties (e.g., with payment of transit fees) in order to ensure the South Korean vessel’s one-time passage.

Thus, fully aware of all the risks and limitations, Seoul has begun taking the first steps towards long-term cooperation with Russia on the NSR, by preparing cautious pilot projects. The first trial voyage was announced to be realized in August-September 2026 (Lee and Park, 2026).

Cooperation Opportunities Under Different Scenarios

Russian and South Korean Long-Term Interests

Russia has a long-term interest in cooperating with South Korea in the Arctic, and on the NSR in particular.

First and foremost, Russia needs to diversify its external partners. Under sanctions and with limited access to Western technologies and markets, Russia has enhanced cooperation with China, including in the Arctic, but long-term dependence on a single partner poses strategic and economic risks. Thus, Russia stands to benefit from adding other, complementary Asian partnerships.

Second, the largest NSR-related challenge, besides attracting investment, is acquiring special technologies and skills required for operation in Arctic conditions. The NSR development requires a specialized fleet, efficient port management, and the coordination of complex seasonal routes.

In this context, Russia would benefit from investment and technology partners to defray the NSR’s costs and smooth its operation.

The third factor relates to the economic rationale for developing the NSR. The project remains capital-intensive and highly risky. Its competitiveness directly depends on the ability to control operation costs, ensure supply reliability, and reduce accident and climate risks as much as possible. For Russia, cooperating with external industrial partners is a way to increase the efficiency of its Arctic activity, rather than internationalizing it. In this sense, South Korea is viewed not as a sales market, but as a potential partner in creating a more sustainable economic model for the NSR’s operation and as a source of capital.

The fourth factor is the geo-economic dimension of potential Russia-South Korea cooperation. It is critical for Russia that the NSR become an internationally significant route, rather than a domestic or bilateral one. Sustained interest from various Asian economies, including South Korea, will help develop the NSR within the broader Eurasian logistics system. In this sense the Korean track of cooperation is part of a strategy for maintaining the diversity of external relations.

Fifth, and final, is the political factor. South Korea is not an Arctic power with political or territorial ambitions in the region, and cooperation with it is thus less likely to be politicized, more likely to remain pragmatic.

As for South Korea’s interest in cooperation, it is exclusively practical: the NSR largely runs along the Russian coast and through its inland waters. As a trading nation relying more than 99% on maritime shipment, South Korea seeks to diversify transportation routes and reduce logistical risks. For Seoul, the NSR is a potential alternative to the instability of traditional sea routes. Furthermore, South Korea is interested in long-term access to the Arctic’s strategic raw materials (e.g., lithium for batteries) and in putting its shipbuilding and engineering to work.

Leaving sanctions aside, the long-term interests of Russia and South Korea overlap in several key areas.

First, shipbuilding and an Arctic fleet. Russia needs river-sea-class vessels and specialized research and support vessels, while South Korea has the expertise and experience to organize modern, large-scale ship production, including ice-class vessels. South Korean expertise could also support Russian ports’ technological, digital, safety, and environmental modernization (EY Report, 2026, pp. 13, 17-20).

Second, South Korean companies’ expertise in construction and port digitalization could be of use in managing port-to-railway-to-NSR and river-to-NSR shipments.

Third, Arctic resources, exported via the NSR, could be utilized by South Korean manufacturing, e.g., of batteries (EY Report, 2026, pp. 18, 21-22).

Strategically, the NSR could become not just a single route, but an element of a broader architecture in the Arctic and Northeast Asia, combining Russia’s resources and logistics with South Korea’s technology and industry.

Deferred Cooperation in the Current Geopolitical Environment

Under the current sanctions regime, opportunities for practical cooperation on the NSR will remain very limited, but possible. The main task is to create the broadest possible framework and mechanisms for deferred cooperation in a future more favorable environment.

Joint investment projects and a strategic alliance are currently impossible, but cautious technical, infrastructural, and expert-based cooperation can be devised.

Possible tracks of cooperation include:

1. Specialized shipbuilding. Joint construction not of large-capacity icebreakers, but of the small and specialized ice-class vessels servicing the NSR’s river-sea logistics. This includes design, engineering, technical documentation, standardization, and consulting.
2. Ports and infrastructure. South Korean specialists may participate in the development of Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and other ports—and of associated railway infrastructure—through individual EPC contracts, technological support, and special investment regimes that minimize sanctions risk (e.g., exchange of raw materials for South Korean companies’ participation) (EY Report, 2026, p. 15).
3. Pilot projects and phased testing of the route. The announced South Korean plan, for a container ship’s trial voyage from Busan to Rotterdam, needs to be scaled up to two or three test voyages per year, accompanied by navigational, logistical, and emergency testing of the route. Until the NSR is integrated into global supply chains, this will grant the South Koreans experience with Arctic operations and cooperation with Russian specialists.
4. Working groups and ‘semi-official’ diplomacy (‘Track 1.5’). We suggest establishing a civil Russia-South Korean working group involving shipowners, ports, ship classification societies, insurers, and research institutions. It would discuss standards, insurance, logistics, and regulations without concluding formal agreements, and keep the South Korean and Russian governments informed.
5. Technical standards, safety criteria, and data exchange. Current conditions permit cooperation between Russian and South Korean ship classification societies, the development of compatible safety protocols, the joint verification of ice-class vessels, the coordination of insurance mechanisms, the exchange of meteorological and marine data, and the conduct of regular safety and environmental-protection exercises. This will create the necessary technical foundation for future cooperation.
6. Educational and personnel programs. Educational and personnel exchanges appear promising and mutually beneficial for building trust and creating a foundation for long-term cooperation. They may include training of specialists in Arctic shipping, insurance, and environmental monitoring. South Koreans would be interested in gaining Arctic experience, while Russians could enrich their knowledge of South Korea’s latest advances in technology and information.

In sum, we propose that the two countries draw closer to one another technically, starting with nongovernmental pilot programs that minimize sanctions risks and develop institutional and professional compatibility.

But Russia should also make clear that NSR cooperation can be conducted only on a mutually beneficial basis, that Seoul is expected to be responsive to Russia’s interests and needs.

Prospective Cooperation Guidelines

In the long term, if sanctions are at least partly lifted, Russia-South Korea cooperation could greatly expand.

If sanctions remain, but certain sectoral and functional windows open up, then a prompt response will be needed based on the knowledge and experience accumulated through the prior stages of deferred cooperation. Even just some easing of financial restrictions would remove many of the current obstacles to cooperation.

However, much planning by experts and corporations is oriented towards a significant easing of political pressure, or lifting of sanctions, which permits full-fledged cooperation in: construction of a specialized fleet (including icebreakers with SMR technology); development of port infrastructure (including in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk); LNG projects; and creation of an integrated transport corridor through the Arctic and Northeast Asia, incorporating various South Korean ports like Donghae, Pohang, Ulsan, Busan, Jinhae, and Yeosu-Gwangyang.

If the status quo is maintained, deferred cooperation will remain the only possibility, but even it can considerably benefit both Russia and South Korea.

*  *  *

The Northern Sea Route is an integral part of Russia’s geo-economic strategy, which includes systemic cooperation with Asian partners. In this context, South Korea is not an alternative to other partners, but is potentially complementary to them, offering advanced industrial, logistical, and management expertise.

Given current restrictions, South Korean companies’ caution is understandable. But they are interested in cooperation, and several opportunities for it already exist, namely the planned trial voyage of a South Korean container ship along the NSR.

By building expertise and trust between private companies, ship classification societies, and port operators; by establishing permanent channels of dialogue; and by increasing mutual understanding and awareness of the parties’ specific characteristics and operating procedures, deferred cooperation can create a ‘quiet infrastructure’ for future full-scale cooperation.

The South Korean pilot voyage, scheduled for August-September 2026, will greatly clarify the feasibility of Russia-South Korea cooperation on the NSR. In the future, much will depend on changes in the sanctions regime. But even the emergence of sectoral windows of opportunity could permit much currently postponed cooperation.

For citation, please use:
Bespalov, A.S., 2026. World Map: To Each Their Own? Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 224–228. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-224-228

For fifteen years until its collapse, the Soviet Union regularly published a popular science series titled Looking at the Political Map of the World. Issued monthly, these brochures examined current events in specific countries or regions and offered historical context. They served as an excellent companion to the world map itself, which, amid ongoing decolonization, was updated almost annually. Attention was also paid to long-established countries, both near and far. Soviet citizens had many opportunities to deepen their knowledge of political geography.

This legacy of basic geographic knowledge—shared with other European countries[1]—may be why stories of cartographic blunders in U.S. media[2] remain so popular in post-Soviet Russia.

But there is one thing that even a strong geographical culture does not resolve. The political map of the world has never been universally accepted: a map depicts the globe, but also the official viewpoint—even the political philosophy—of its country of origin. Perhaps the most basic manifestation of this is map-centering. Western and Russian maps are typically centered along the prime meridian, though in post-war Soviet and contemporary Russian cartography, the Moscow meridian has been used. Maps published in the United States sometimes center the axis on America, splitting Eurasia in two, while Chinese maps are generally centered on the Pacific Ocean.

But the depiction of national borders carries even greater political resonance.

While map-centering offers different perspectives on geographic reality, drawn borders often bear no relation to it.

The first post-war generation of West German schoolchildren grew up with maps showing Germany within its 1937 borders, with the GDR labeled a “Soviet occupation zone” and East Prussia as being “currently under Soviet/Polish administration.” During the Cold War, American maps noted that the United States did not recognize the incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the USSR, yet still depicted the Baltic republics as part of the Soviet Union. For eighty years, Indian maps have shown the entire former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir as part of India, while Pakistani maps claim it as their own. Incidentally, Soviet maps were much closer to reality on the Kashmir issue, as they showed the 1949 demarcation line. Yet Korea remained formally unified on Soviet maps until the establishment of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Seoul in 1990. Countries that do not recognize Israel depict it as Palestine. The list goes on.

The first decade of the 21st century saw a qualitative leap in cartography, as it was revolutionized by the Internet. In 2005, Google Maps set a new standard for mass geographic media. It combined three key components: vector maps (borders, names, roads, points of interest), satellite imagery, and interactive features (route planning and, later, the ability to correct and add data). In showing national borders, Google initially took a technological approach, prioritizing functionality and navigational accuracy. But by the end of the decade, its product had gained such widespread popularity and authority that it began to influence military and political realities.

In October 2010, a Nicaraguan detachment landed on Costa Rica’s Calero Island and began dredging the San Juan River—acting, according to the Nicaraguan commander, based on Google Maps. The ensuing diplomatic conflict was later dubbed by the media “The First Google Maps War,”[3] but, fortunately did not escalate into real war, and was resolved in court in Costa Rica’s favor. After this and several other incidents, Google, a U.S.-based company, changed its approach to depicting borders. Recognizing their explosive nature and facing the demands of national laws, Google abandoned the idea of a ‘single map for everyone’ and adopted a localization strategy. In disputed cases, Google Maps now shows different borders (depending on the user’s location) or uses dotted lines. The same applies to place names: in 2025, Google quickly reacted to President Trump’s executive order, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America—for U.S. users.[4]

This localization policy has proven an elegant solution, allowing the company to largely avoid conflicts with the authorities of countries where it operates, although this does not always prevent scandals. Russia’s Yandex took a similar approach, displaying international borders in accordance with national legislation—until the summer of 2022. At that point, regulatory and sanctions risks drove Yandex to remove state and administrative borders, officially presented as a “shift in focus to natural features.”[5] Other Russian online map services—2GIS and VK Maps—have followed Yandex’s example, though the latter still shows administrative borders.

While American companies have adopted a localized approach to borders, and Russian ones hedge by displaying none at all, Asian companies strictly adhere to their own governments’ policies. South Korea’s Naver Maps, for instance, not only indicates the Liancourt Rocks (claimed by Japan) as South Korean territory but, driven by patriotic considerations,[6] provides unique content, such as underwater photos. However, Naver, like its competitor Kakao Maps, lacks global coverage.

The same cannot be said for the Chinese map service Baidu, which presents all users worldwide with a ten‑dash line in the South China Sea and with China’s claimed border with India. Moreover, Baidu’s map not only fails to reflect the results of the 2005 demarcation of the Russian‑Chinese border, but also draws the Russian‑Japanese maritime border north of Iturup Island, labeling the Southern Kuril Islands as “Russian‑occupied” (俄占). Apparently, the borders are depicted as they were defined by the cartographical agency in 1989, and an update is dependent upon demarcation with other states.[7]

This argument appears to satisfy Russia: China has repeatedly stated that all border disputes with Russia have been resolved, and that discrepancies between maps and reality are a technical, not political issue.

But at least Chinese users can see some version (even an outdated one) of their country’s border. Demand for the same is clearly present in Russia, and online maps’ importance casts doubt on Russian companies’ attempt to ‘stay out of politics.’ Users have already developed their own solutions, adding custom map layers on top of Yandex, whether for military analysis[8] or genealogy.[9] It would be a step in the right direction to provide Russian online maps with a standard toggleable ‘borders’ layer, with a choice of historical period.

This article is an edited version of the paper written for the Valdai Discussion Club, https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/political-map-of-the-world-to-each-their-own/

For citation, please use:
Trenin, D.V., 2026. The Wars of Our Time. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 10–27. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-10-27

It is said that generals always prepare for the previous war. This does not mean that the military is incapable of preparing for the future; while inertia is indeed as common among soldiers as it is among civilians, the price is much higher. Rather, it means that war’s technological and political character changes constantly—and cardinally, with every world war—even as it remains fundamentally the armed imposition of one’s will on the enemy.

Today we are witnessing a transition from mainly mechanized to increasingly digital warfare. The military is usually first to employ scientific and technological advances. Various digital technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and its databases, robotics, cyberwarfare, and space weapons will increasingly define war, radically modifying tactics and strategy.

This new character of war signifies the end of 500-year-long Western dominance and 40-year-long U.S. hegemony. A new world order, often called multipolar, is nearing. It will feature powers of various sizes and civilizations, with various understandings of world order. But before considering how to harmonize these different understandings, we should remember that the transition to it will involve fierce struggle. In the 20th century, the emergence of a new world order triggered two world wars. A third one was avoided because the two main belligerents recognized mutually assured nuclear destruction.

In the mid-2010s, the world entered a new stage of transition, functionally analogous to a world war. To avoid confusing analogies and numbering, this can be termed a new world war with 21st-century features. This war is already underway, consisting of multiple lengthy and intermittent wars, which will produce intermediate results and eventually a final balance. These wars are being fought openly in Eastern Europe and in the adjacent seas, in the Middle East, and (as special operations) in Latin America. But the biggest conflict is brewing in East Asia and the Western Pacific. The stakes in the new world war are so high that it will likely be lengthy, and be fought brutally and resolutely, affecting the entire world. We have entered an era of long wars.

Digital War

In the age of information systems, crucial battlefield importance is logically held by the real-time integration of reconnaissance, detection, targeting, and fire. This is most strikingly exemplified in the ‘drone revolution’ that has upended warfare. This phenomenon has been thoroughly analyzed by General of the Army Yuri Baluyevsky and Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies Ruslan Pukhov (Baluyevsky and Pukhov, 2026).

Essentially, a wide belt of total destruction, extending 20-30 km from the front line—where any platform and even individual soldier will be certainly destroyed by FPV drones—has eliminated the crucial principle of force concentration to break through the enemy lines. On the contrary, dispersing forces has become the rule. War of maneuver with tank breakthroughs has given way to infiltration of the enemy’s position by two or three soldiers. The ‘front’ is actually a gray zone, where the opponents often hold points behind each other’s lines, jutting into one another. The siege of a small fortress city may last months.

Modern warfare now encompasses everything from hand-to-hand trench combat to piloting systems far from the battlefield. Swarms of drones with a range of 100-300 km turn the enemy’s operational rear into an area of constant danger. The almost complete transparency of the entire theater of war, obscured only by the weather, makes it almost impossible to use another important principle—surprise. The ‘fog of war’ has almost dissipated, except for the real fog that sometimes hides troops’ movement from the all-seeing eye of the reconnaissance drones.

Moreover, drones with hundred- and even thousand-kilometer ranges can hit targets deep behind enemy lines that once could be reached only by long-range missiles. Ukrainian UAVs from the Baltic Sea reach the Ural Mountains, and Iranian UAVs reach British bases in Cyprus.

The possibility of accurately hitting critical targets deep in the rear has blurred the old boundaries between tactics, operations, and strategy.

The drone revolution has largely devalued traditional combat platforms. Tanks designed to break through the front line and conduct direct fire are now useful mainly as self-propelled artillery systems, and have themselves become targets for long-range attacks. Artillery guns, especially those using precision-guided munitions, remain in service, but are less cost-effective. Instead of aerial dogfights, air defense systems face off against ballistic and cruise missiles. Warships are struck by sea drones. Air defense systems, designed to shoot down enemy planes, are forced to use expensive interceptors against relatively cheap drones. The importance of electronic warfare, space communications, and surveillance has increased tremendously.

Regionalization of Local Conflicts

Technological advances have made the theater of war practically boundless. Today, one should speak not of a conflict in Ukraine, but of a conflict in Eastern Europe. Kiev is an instrument of NATO countries’ common policy. Russia conducts strikes across all of Ukrainian territory, and Kiev against dozens of Russian regions, using Baltic and Finnish territory. The Kiev regime carries out acts of sabotage and terrorism deep inside Russia, with the help, support, and control of Britain and other NATO countries. Ships carrying Russian oil and LNG face piracy in the Black, Baltic, and Mediterranean Seas. In Operation Cobweb, Ukrainian drones attacked Siberian airfields. Similarly, Israel attacked Iranian targets during the Twelve-Day War. The “quiet” cyberwar goes on non-stop. This creates the obvious and real risk of pushing the Ukraine conflict towards a regional war between NATO and Russia.

In the Middle East, conflict has expanded from the local level—Israel and its neighbors (Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and earlier Egypt)—to the regional level—Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Turkiye and Cyprus. The Persian Gulf, and the Red and Arabian Seas, have become warzones. An American submarine sank an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles away from Iran, off the coast of Sri Lanka.

In response to the U.S.-Israeli aggression, Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz for the first time ever, and its allies in Yemen may close the Bab el-Mandeb. Tehran launched missiles at the American military base on Diego Garcia 4,000 km away. Despite Israel’s dense air defenses, almost all of its territory—more or less effectively protected during previous wars—has been struck by missiles and UAVs. 2026 essentially saw much of the Middle East being drawn into a regional war between Israel and the U.S. against Iran and its allies.

Thus, the technological revolution has changed war dramatically. Improved intelligence capabilities and military technology have increased the accuracy of strikes enormously, with distance from the front line no longer playing a decisive role; the theater of war has expanded significantly, covering not only the territory of the belligerents (other than the U.S.), but also targets outside them. Moreover, there is an increasingly clear connection between certain conflicts, particularly in Ukraine and Iran. 

The latest novelty is that some decisions (e.g., choice of targets) and their execution can now be delegated to AI and autonomous systems.

According to media reports, the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife was prepared with the help of AI (Wall Street Journal, 2026). AI was also reportedly used to select targets in Iran (Gustafson and Kosslyn, 2026).

However, many elements of traditional war remain relevant. Wars have not become bloodless computer games: hundreds of thousands of people are fighting on both sides of the front line, including in close combat in the trenches with the use of cold steel, with losses in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The difference between the front and rear has blurred significantly, but has not disappeared: war and peace have learned to exist side by side. And not all modern military conflicts are as fast-moving as the U.S.’s Operations Desert Storm (1991) and Shock and Awe (2002) in Iraq, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), or Russia’s five-day war to impose peace on Georgia (2008). The Ukraine conflict is of particular importance in this regard.

A War of Attrition

After a brief period of maneuver, the war in Ukraine turned into a war of attrition. There are no large-scale offensives or frontline breakthroughs into operational depth. The main method of warfare, along with the grueling offensive on the ground (grinding down the enemy), is constant pressure to exhaust the enemy’s front line and, increasingly, rear. The Russian army’s main task is not so much seizing territory (although Russian troops have held the initiative and gradually pushed forward since 2024) as bringing the enemy to collapse by eliminating his manpower and materiel and by destroying or crippling his military-industrial infrastructure, energy systems, logistics routes, control centers, etc. The goal is to drain the Kiev regime’s resources, disorganize its rear, and convince its Western sponsors that the Ukrainian ‘asset’ is worthless.

The enemy also opted for a strategy of exhaustion, trying to “inflict a strategic defeat on Russia”—first by undermining its economy and finances, and then by preventing Russia from winning the war. Since 2014, the collective West has imposed an unprecedented 30,000 sanctions on Russia and seized the half of its foreign exchange reserves that were kept in Western jurisdictions. Sanctions are an economic war of attrition, especially in a globalized economy.

Priority in the war of attrition is given to the energy sector.

As part of the ‘infrastructure war,’ in the first months of the Special Military Operation, the enemy blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. Later, the Ukrainians blew up onshore gas and oil pipelines (including Druzhba) connecting Russia with European countries. According to Russian intelligence, Kiev also plans to destroy the Black Sea’s Blue Stream and Turkish Stream gas pipelines.

Nuclear power facilities have no immunity against strikes, either. The Zaporozhye NPP, controlled by Russian troops, is constantly shelled by Ukraine. Other Russian nuclear power plants, especially in Kursk and Smolensk, have also been struck by Ukrainian forces. In turn, Russian forces have attacked electrical substations transmitting electricity from Ukrainian nuclear power plants to consumers—harming the Ukrainian rear, but not creating any risk of radioactive contamination.

In 2025, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran to destroy its nuclear program, damaging several sites’ infrastructure but leaving the Bushehr nuclear power plant untouched. Yet its grounds were struck in 2026, to which Tehran responded with an attack on the Israeli Nuclear Research Center near Dimona.

While Western countries set price ceilings on Russian oil and piratically seized tankers, Ukrainian aerial and sea drones attacked Russian oil refineries, marine export terminals, oil tankers, and LNG carriers. The goal was stated openly: to reduce Russia’s energy exports and thus its budget revenue.

The situation is similar in the Middle East conflict. With the same aim in mind, Western countries imposed price ceilings on Iranian oil, sanctions against its buyers and against ships carrying Iranian oil and petroleum products, and illegally stopped and arrested such vessels. In response to the U.S.-Israeli aggression in 2026, Iran attacked oil refineries, LNG plants, and other energy infrastructure in the Gulf states with U.S. military bases, and also took control of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. In the Red Sea, the Iran-allied Houthis have threatened to attack Israel- and U.S.-linked ships, endangering transit through the Bab el-Mandeb and Suez Canal. The infrastructure war in the Middle East has also spread to digital facilities, such as data centers in Bahrain and other Gulf countries.

In the asymmetric war between the U.S./Israel and Iran, Tehran leaned heavily on economic weapons. By closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking the energy facilities of Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases, Tehran sought to impose economic pressure on the U.S. and its allies, making them back down.

Another version of the war of attrition is unfolding in Latin America. The U.S. imposed a blockade on Cuba after the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, expanding it in 2026 to oil imports from third countries, basically leaving the country without fuel and electricity. The U.S. President announced that these actions seek to replace Cuba’s government and political course with pro-American ones. Similarly, the U.S. blocked Venezuelan oil exports to force a change in policy.

A war of attrition thus becomes primarily a test of the resilience of the belligerents’ political systems and societies. Russia and Iran have so far passed this test; Venezuela has at present given up; Cuba is holding out for now; and China is drawing lessons.

The War of Annihilation—Massive and Individualized

Not all modern wars are wars of attrition. Israel’s response to Hamas’s massive terrorist attack on civilians was intended to completely eliminate the threat from this Palestinian group. Israeli strikes killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza in 2023-2025, condemned by many throughout the world as genocide. More than 3,500 Iranian civilians were killed during the 40-day U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran in the spring of 2026.

However, mass killing of the enemy’s civilian population is certainly not new. World War II involved numerous cases of deliberate extermination of civilians not only by the Nazis, their allies, and the Japanese, but also by U.S. and British carpet bombings of German and Japanese cities, and by the U.S. atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Israel is also known for assassinations. Since 2023, the Israeli intelligence agencies have killed many senior figures of Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon, Gaza, and beyond, including Tehran. Even before Israel’s first attack on Iran in 2025, a number of high-ranking Iranian military advisers were slain by Israel in Syria.

At the beginning of the Twelve-Day War against Iran in June 2025, Israeli agents liquidated dozens of high-ranking Iranian civil and military officials, as well as nuclear physicists. The incumbent Iranian President was also among the targets.

At the outbreak of the new aggression in 2026, Israeli missile strikes killed 49 Iranian top officials, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—not an already-deposed leader like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, or a terrorist like bin Laden, but the recognized chief executive of a UN member state. And it came less than two months after the Americans forcibly seized the legitimate head of another state—Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The action against Venezuela repeated—on a new technological level—the 1990 operation against Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who was also captured and sent to an American prison. U.S. intelligence agencies have developed targeted killing, particularly during the post-9/11 War on Terror. President Barack Obama personally gave many orders to eliminate—usually with drones—individuals designated by the U.S. as terrorists. In 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Qasem Soleimani.

The Ukrainian security services also use terrorist methods in the ongoing war. In 2024-2026, they attacked four senior Russian generals in Moscow and executed or attempted the assassination of several prominent Russian public figures, journalists, philosophers, and writers. At the end of 2025, Ukrainian UAVs carried out a massive attack on the Russian President’s residence in Valdai, in which NATO intelligence services were apparently involved per evidence cited by Russian officials (RG, 2025).

Israel, the U.S., and NATO-supported Ukraine have broken with the understanding, which dates to well before the Cold War, that political and military leaders generally enjoy unspoken immunity during hostilities. Notably, according to Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, President Putin guaranteed Vladimir Zelensky’s safety in April 2022 (RBC, 2023). Yet eliminating an enemy commander on the battlefield has often been a desirable goal, and killing the opposing political leader was considered one of the shortest ways to win the war or at least avoid defeat.

Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure have been practiced not only by Israel and the U.S., but also by Ukraine since the outbreak of the crisis in 2014.

Both the targeted destruction of the enemy’s leaders and the massive killing of its population underline war’s nature in the 21st century.

21st-century wars are multifaceted and multidimensional. Even in the past, the physical battlefield—the theater of operations—was never the only dimension of military conflict, but now the other dimensions have grown so much as to cardinally change things. Economy and finance; technology and resources; information and psychology; cyberspace and outer space—the list of battlefields is far from complete.

The Nature of War

Statesmen and their advisers sometimes also prepare for the previous war, which often makes for a shocking exposure to the new reality, especially for those who were convinced of peace’s inevitability and deterrence’s absolute reliability. But wars have permeated all of human history, and an era of new—qualitatively different—major wars has now begun after eighty years of peace between the great powers.

The Cold War proceeded, under the nuclear sword of Damocles, through local wars on the periphery of the superpowers’ global confrontation. The end of the bipolar confrontation was immediately followed by an approximately 10-year period of interethnic conflicts in disintegrating or failed states. Those conflicts were accompanied by external interference and peacekeeping operations, as well as by military interventions (in the Balkans and Middle East) to establish a new unipolar (U.S.-centric) world order. Terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 ushered in a period of counter-terrorist operations and the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, with the aim of reconstructing them along Western lines. But by the middle of the 2010s, contradictions between the great powers had resurfaced again. The ‘unipolar moment’ had ended.

Modern wars reflect the crisis of the post-Cold-War U.S.-centric world order and of the West’s lengthy global dominance. By provoking wars (in Ukraine) and initiating them (in the Middle East), the U.S. has launched a counteroffensive against its opponents (Russia, Iran) and competitors (China, BRICS, the EU, and the Arab Gulf states). The Trump administration’s goal is to force a new (illiberal) model of global hegemony upon the world. But unlike the previous (globalist) hegemony, this one does not rest on ideological dominance, political leadership, or norms. Rather, it implies the supremacy of U.S. power beyond the framework of a political order.

In their current wars, the Americans are exploiting their allies more than cooperating with them, activating them on the geopolitical ‘front line’ in Europe (Kiev and NATO), in the Middle East (the Gulf states), and in Asia (Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea). The U.S.’s long-term ‘protection’ of these countries is now driving them into collision with their larger neighbors, threatening their devastation or even destruction.

Notably, unlike in the Cold War, the other side—Russia, Belarus, China, Iran, and the DPRK—is not yet inclined to create a military alliance to concertedly respond to the U.S.; Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are ready to fight only for their own interests. The only military alliances are Russia–Belarus and Russia–DPRK. India has taken a decidedly neutral position, developing strategic partnerships with the U.S., Russia, France, and other EU countries, as well as with Britain, and Japan. The Collective Security Treaty Organization’s members, other than Belarus, also remain neutral.

 Since 1945, wars have not been declared. Even diplomatic relations are often maintained (embassies are simply evacuated), and martial law is eschewed (to preserve peacetime conditions for civilians as much as possible). It is especially ominous that diplomatic negotiations are not just conducted in parallel with undiminished military operations, but have been used by Washington and Tel Aviv as cover for new attacks. During the Cold War, attacks were feared under the guise of military exercises, but in 2025 and 2026 they began under the guise of peace talks.

War and peace coexist in the same place and at the same time. The parties simultaneously fight and trade with each other. Gas and oil pipelines, running from Russia to the EU through Ukraine, kept operating long after February 2022. The U.S. President almost simultaneously announced his intention to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” and to lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports (to mitigate the war’s damage to world energy markets).

In general, the space of peace is shrinking, while that of war is expanding.

Nuclear Weapons

This growing relativity of peace signals the approach of a direct conflict between the leading powers. Nuclear deterrence has been critically weakened at the strategic level. States now pursue objectives that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War: in the case of the West’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the objective is the strategic defeat of a nuclear superpower (Russia) in its most sensitive strategic region. In the case of Iran, the objective is not only the complete elimination of its nuclear program, but also its missile-disarmament, subversion, and dismemberment.

Deterrence is weakening mostly because of the disappearance of the salutary fear that kept the Cold War cold and warded off a nuclear apocalypse. The leaders of European states—from large (Germany) to small (Estonia)—now make dangerous provocations, as if they did not care about the consequences for their own countries and people, should Moscow respond to such provocations.[1] This indicates European politicians’ mental derangement and, even more so, their ‘post-national syndrome:’ the elites have no homeland.[2]

The paradoxical reaction of people in European countries is also quite interesting. Influenced by their government and media propaganda, they simultaneously hallucinate non-existent threats (a Russian invasion of NATO countries) and remain blind to the very real possibility of their leaders’ actions pushing Moscow to use force against NATO.

As a result, strategic stability—in its broad geostrategic meaning, rather than in the narrow and obsolete sense of disincentive for nuclear attack—has been seriously undermined. In 2025 alone, the nuclear-armed U.S., UK, and France waged a protracted proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia in Ukraine;[3] nuclear-armed India and Pakistan briefly clashed directly; and nuclear-armed Israel and the U.S. attacked a ‘near-nuclear’ Iran. The DPRK did not enter into conflict with the U.S., but sent its troops to help Russia liberate the part of Kursk Oblast that had been occupied by Ukraine with the West’s support. Only one nuclear power out of nine—China—remained in a state of relative peace, a more ‘regular’ confrontation with the U.S.

All of these wars were/are fought under the threat of nuclear weapons. Their use—as the previous fear diminishes—becomes more likely. But the view in the 1960s-1980s that any nuclear use would inevitably lead to mankind’s destruction[4] is being supplanted by the view that a general nuclear war is impossible (as no one would initiate it), yet the consequences of a limited nuclear war would not be disastrous.

This has boosted the popularity of nuclear weapons as a means of preventing an attack. Possession of nuclear weapons is considered the only real safeguard against external aggression, as clearly evidenced by the U.S.’s diverging policies towards nuclear-armed North Korea, non-nuclear Iran, and Iraq and Libya, which voluntarily abandoned their nuclear programs. In 2026, following the U.S.-Israeli attack, Iran’s parliament raised the issue of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Renewed interest in nuclear weapons has also been bolstered by the Trump administration’s de facto refusal to provide nuclear guarantees to U.S. allies. Europe is discussing ‘extended deterrence’ based on France’s nuclear forces or, as they say in Germany, some kind of ‘European nuclear capabilities.’ Poland, Greece and Estonia have declared their readiness to deploy allied nuclear weapons on their soil; Sweden is holding consultations with the UK on a nuclear umbrella that supposedly can protect it.

But it cannot. Britain needs U.S. permission to use nuclear weapons. France’s arsenal is under its own control, but is unlikely to be used except in defense of its own vital interests. In the 21st century, there is probably no country that would sacrifice itself for an ally. The only instance of truly reliable extended nuclear deterrence is Russia’s guarantee to Minsk. But Russia and Belarus are a Union State, not only a military alliance.

In Asia, the situation is also changing, though not so noticeably. Japan has not made any statements yet, but according to some experts, the country could create a nuclear weapon very quickly (Report, 2023). In South Korea, which also has a venerable civilian nuclear program and missile capabilities, some top officials have in the past stressed the necessity to develop nuclear weapons, but so far Seoul has settled for an agreement with the U.S. on a nuclear consultative mechanism. Among U.S. clients, the idea of obtaining nuclear weapons is popular in Taiwan and Ukraine, but China and Russia strongly oppose it and are ready to prevent it.

In the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, a large and wealthy regional power, and Pakistan, the only Muslim state with nuclear weapons, seem to be forming an alliance. The Middle East may see further nuclear proliferation. Israel became a nuclear power at the turn of the 1970s. Iran, which under Khamenei sought only the capability to produce nuclear weapons, is now contemplating secession from the NPT given U.S.-Israeli aggression. Other possible candidates for the nuclear club include Saudi Arabia and Turkiye.

So, nuclear non-proliferation, one of the final remaining pillars of the former bipolar world order, is collapsing along with nuclear arms control, which formally ended with the expiration of the extended Russian-American START-3 Treaty in February 2026.

The multipolar world is becoming an increasingly multipolar nuclear world, in which nuclear war is no longer unthinkable.

Coalitions

During the Cold War, World War III was envisioned as a clash between the two opposing blocs. But when the Soviet-American confrontation ended, there remained only one permanent military alliance: NATO, led by the U.S. Since then, the alliance has doubled its members and fought in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya. However, the 2003 campaign in Iraq involved the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ The Ukraine conflict, too, initially spurred the creation of an informal coalition of about 50 states, whose representatives regularly met at Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany to plan and coordinate military support for Kiev.

In contrast, not only did Russia’s bloc (the Warsaw Treaty Organization) collapse, but all of its members—along with several former Soviet republics—joined NATO or at least cooperate with it closely. Ukraine has become a belligerent Anti-Russia. Even the members of Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) have largely assumed neutrality regarding the Ukraine conflict.

A new and positive factor for Russia, compared to the Cold War period, is the development of partnerships with major countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moscow’s leading partners in BRICS and the SCO—primarily China and India—cooperate with Russia, but are careful to ensure that this does not harm their extensive and close relationships with the U.S. and Europe. Belarus and North Korea have become Russia’s only real allies in its showdown with the West. 

However, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has deprived NATO countries of the illusion of guaranteed U.S. military assistance in the event of a conflict. To avoid a direct military clash with Russia, the U.S. is shifting responsibility for Europe’s security onto European countries. The U.S. is acting similarly in its construction of an anti-Chinese coalition out of its Asian allies.

Some of the ongoing wars are asymmetric (two-level), with temporary and loose coalitions replacing permanent and rigid alliances.

While Russia is directly fighting against Ukraine, this is actually a broader war with the Western coalition, even as Russia strengthens its military integration with Belarus within the Union State and receives real military support from the DPRK. In the Middle East, Israel is trying alone to destroy Hamas in Gaza, pro-Iranian Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, but has managed to harness the power of its U.S. ally against Iran. Military tensions between China and Taiwan are growing in East Asia; but, again, this is only the first level of the broader conflict: China versus the U.S. and its Asian allies (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines).

What Kind of Wars Should Russia Prepare for?

Modern wars reflect a crisis of world order. The rise or revival of new regional or global centers of power has inevitably prompted the former hegemons to contain their growth and strengthen their own position.

The military threats to Russia are diverse, but their general nature is obvious for the foreseeable future: to weaken and, if possible, destroy Russia. The most serious risk is a military clash with NATO in Eastern Europe, the Baltic, or the Arctic. For the first time since World War II, Europe is becoming the main threat to Russia. If Ukraine survives as a separate state, it may provoke a European war and take an active part in it. The threat of Transnistria unfreezing appears quite real. Germany, Poland, the UK, the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, Finland, and possibly Romania may also actively oppose Russia. The U.S. will keep to the rear, but will extensively support the Europeans. The risk of direct war with a European coalition, unthinkable until just recently, should be neither ignored nor downplayed.

Russia’s opponents will also seek to open new fronts against it, exploiting disagreements with its southern neighbors, but Western attempts to draw Georgia into war against Russia were stymied by Tbilisi’s firm focus on its national interests. Nevertheless, Georgia’s relapse into Saakashvili-like gambles could be possible under a different government. Armenia is ‘peacefully’ drifting away from Russia towards the West, but bilateral tensions are noticeably growing and may eventually lead to provocations against Russia’s base in Gyumri. European countries, especially Britain, will also spin intrigues against Russia in Central Asia.  

Objectively, Russian and Turkish interests run up against one another in the Caucasus, Black Sea, and Central Asia, but the two countries’ relations are fairly stable. A military conflict is avoidable, and pragmatic cooperation is possible. Russia will need special attention, tact, and understanding of Turkish motives.

In Asia, Russia risks being drawn into a confrontation between China and the U.S. (and its allies). Politically, Moscow will naturally side with Beijing and provide it with economic and military-technical support if the West imposes a blockade. Yet Moscow need not directly involve itself in the conflict—China is a strong military power with an increasing nuclear capability.

Beijing’s position on the conflict in Ukraine can serve as a guideline for Russia. Russia will have to provide direct military assistance to North Korea in the event of a conflict on the Korean Peninsula, but the likelihood of an attack by the U.S. and its allies on the nuclear-armed DPRK is extremely low. Even less likely, though not impossible, is a direct military clash between Russia and Japan. The greatest danger to Russia and the whole world would come from a military conflict in East Asia among the U.S., China, Japan, and the two Koreas. This could easily draw Russia in, too, but many will seek to avoid such an apocalyptic scenario.

The struggle for a new world order is likely to be long. We must be prepared for an intense and technologically complex confrontation.

The foreign policy doctrine of Russia, as a civilization-state, logically implies not only protecting the country and its interests, but also ensuring the rights and interests of Russians living abroad. Russia is also the guardian and guarantor of the geopolitical balance in Northern and Central Eurasia. Russia’s military might thus guarantees its own existence and forms the cornerstone of stability throughout much of the planet’s largest continent. As the struggle for the new world order intensifies, our country’s position and strategy will be crucial for determining it.

For citation, please use:
Iserov, A.A., 2026. The United States: From the Unipolar Moment to Relative Hegemony. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 106–115. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-106-115

The current discussion of ‘American decline’ masks the economic, demographic, and military reality beyond the U.S.’s real position in the world. In the fall of 1990, Charles Krauthammer declared the coming of the American unipolar moment, unique in human history, since there was no visible strong opposition to U.S. ascendancy then. Krauthammer thought the unipolar moment would last for “one decade, perhaps, rather than, say, three or four” (Krauthammer, 1990, p. 26). Twelve years later, he bluntly stated that even thirty or forty years of domination, which seemed bold in 1990, was a modest statement if the U.S. remained strong in its commitment to sustaining hegemony: “The unipolar moment has become the unipolar era” (Krauthammer, 2002, p. 17).

Exactly at the time when the U.S. reached the peak of its global power, scholars and journalists launched a discussion of American decline.[1] The U.S. was perceived as a global empire and thus subject to the Anglo-American, or to a broader European, traditional interpretation going back to Polybius (ca. 200–ca. 118 BC), Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406),[2] and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794). Note that we refer here to the concept of gradual systemic decline, not sudden collapse. History shows that forecasts of the latter sort are rarely successful; moreover, even when they are, the reasons provided for the collapse are usually wrong. For example, the overwhelming majority of experts did not believe in the USSR’s possible dissolution, but those who predicted it, did it on the wrong premises: the Soviet Union collapsed neither as a result of the war with China, nor after the revolt of the demographically growing Muslim Central Asian republics (their loyalty to the Soviet Union remained the strongest and in 1991 was in fact stronger than in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) (see Amalrik, 1978, 1980; Carrère d’Encausse, 1978).

This article presents a brief analysis of long-term trends that characterize relative strength of national entities.

Let us compare the data for the U.S. for 1990 and now.

In 1990, the U.S. had a population of 248.7 million, which made 4.67% of the global population (one may recall that on the eve of the disastrous decades that followed the beginning of WWI this figure for the Russian Empire was at ca. 8%). In 2024, the U.S. population (341.2 million) accounted for 4.16% of the world population, i.e., decreased but not dramatically. For an economically developed nation with a declining religious commitment, the absolute population growth, even though achieved through immigration, is a remarkable indicator.

There seems to be no strong evidence that recent immigrants would not follow the path of their predecessors and would not get dissolved in the melting pot.

The Latino community is the fastest growing and currently accounts for 14.7% of American eligible voters. According to exit polls, in the 2024 presidential election, 42% of Latinos voted for Donald Trump, despite his anti-immigration and anti-Latin American rhetoric.[3]

In 1990, the IMF estimated the U.S. nominal GDP at 26.3% of the global economy (the European Economic Community then accounted for 27.4%; China, only 1.8%). The 2024 estimate is the same: 26.3%, up from 21.1% in 2011, but down from 31.3% in 2001 and 2002. The European Union’s nominal GDP, following its expansion and later BREXIT, fell almost 1.6-fold to 17.3%; and that of Japan was only 3.8% (down from even 17.8% in 1994 and 1995). Interestingly, while Japan’s ‘lost decade’ (and then decades) became an important subject for academic discussions, the global media hardly seemed to pay attention to the Fall of Japan. The evident dramatic change is, of course, China’s growth, whose 16.9% almost equals that of the EU countries.

De-dollarization is most visible in commodity markets (J.P. Morgan, 2025), even despite Washington’s dollar weaponization policy. But even amid the current instability, global transactions remain largely dollarized, providing an inherent benefit to the U.S. economy (Eichengreen, 2010), though significantly alleviating the already large national debt: its public share exceeded $31 trillion in February 2026).[4] This debt (sustainable, as experts testify contrary to the popular belief) might slow the U.S.’s economic growth but would not undermine its economy. In the long term, it will probably require a ‘robust fiscal stabilization’ (Auerbach and Yagan, 2024; see also: Bernstein, Shaw, and Posthumus, 2025; Lichtenberg, 2026).

One should bear in mind that the long-term forecasts projecting the financial situation to 2100 and beyond, though certainly useful for policy planning, might prove fundamentally wrong as completely new factors may emerge. Remember that modern sophisticated math methods failed to forecast the 2008–2009 economic crisis. And nobody could foresee the spectacular and almost global birth rate decline in 1966 or 1976, at the time of heated discussions about the world’s overpopulation.

While in 2000 the gap between U.S. investments abroad and foreign investments in the U.S. constituted ca. $1.6 trillion, in 2023 this figure rose to nearly 20 trillion (almost 72% of the GDP!), and this growth was most spectacular in the recent years of rising global instability, since the COVID-19 pandemics. The main investors are currently Great Britain, Japan, and the EU countries (Medzhidova, 2024). This huge money flow might compensate for both the growing U.S. debt and certain underperformance (which should not be overestimated though) of the industrial sector (Grigoryev, 2024).

Today it is too early to say what the long-term results of Trump’s second administration’s reforms, foremost the tariff regulation, would be. Will Trump succeed in reviving U.S. industries by tax cuts, protectionism, and the weakening dollar?

Will he contain protectionism-driven inflation? In the first half of 2025, U.S. current account deficit was 4.6% of GDP, lower than at its 2006 peak of 6.2%, though 1.9% higher than the 2013–2024 average (Eichengreen, 2026; IMF eLibrary, 2025). In the third quarter of 2025, U.S. annualized economic growth was 4.3%—faster than in the previous two years and well above the forecasts, while imports fell, despite government spending growing faster than business investment (The Economist, 2026). In January 2026, IMF expected the 2026 growth to reach 1.8% in advanced economies and 2.4% (0.3% higher than the October 2025 forecast) in the U.S. (IMF World Economic Outlook, 2026).

Back in 1987, Paul Kennedy predicted that the “natural” share in the global wealth that America ought to possess was perhaps 16% or 18% (Kennedy, 1987, p. 533), but this forecast would still take a long time to become real. According to IMF estimates, China surpassed the U.S. in 2016 by purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP, with the U.S. share in the global PPP GDP in 2024 reaching only 14.9%—lower than Paul Kennedy’s forecast.[5] Nevertheless, comparing nations’ PPP GDP makes sense when one measures respective living standards (and hence PPP GDP per capita is a more telling indicator), but the national weight in the global economy is measured by the actual exchange rates, thus, nominal GDP reflects the respective positions better (Frankel, 2014).

According to the World Bank estimates, the U.S. GDP share of research and development rose from 2.45% in 1996 to 3.59% in 2022,[6] which is in relative figures lower than in just three countries—Israel (6.02% in 2022), Liechtenstein (5.87% in 2019), and South Korea (5.21% in 2022), but certainly much higher in absolute figures in comparison with competitors, above all China (2.56% in 2022; in 2022, the U.S. spent 2.18-fold more in nominal dollars but just 1.12-fold more in IMF PPP dollars). Nevertheless, we are currently witnessing spectacular successes of Chinese science which has been surpassing America’s by the number of scientific publications since 2017, and seems to have taken over the leadership in the quality of research, above all in electrical and electronic engineering, materials science, physics, and chemistry.[7]

Still, just like in the 20th century when the U.S. profited intellectually from the Old World’s distress (up until to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European Socialist system), the academic immigration (brain gain) is greatly benefiting the U.S., despite Trump’s fighting against the universities and toughening of the migration legislation. There are four times more foreign students studying in the U.S. than American students abroad, and by 2022, the founders of 25% of U.S. billion-dollar startups had immigrated to the U.S. as college students (Lodge, 2025).

According to the SIPRI estimates, in 2023, the U.S. spent 3.4% of its GDP on defense expenditures—down from 5.4% in 1990 but still a spectacular 37% of the global amount—3.09 times more than China which allocates only 1.7% of its GDP for defense. The U.S. armed forces are the third-largest worldwide, with 1.358 million men and women in active service, a bit less than in the much more populous India (1.476 million).[8] Back in 1985, the U.S. armed forces of 2.152 million deployed ca. 520,000 military and civilian personnel abroad (24%), and in the spring of 2025, this figure slightly exceeded 243,000 (18%—lower but still a very significant share).[9] U.S. military bases still encompass the globe, and U.S. Navy ships ply the seas as forty years ago, able to quickly employ force (as in Operation Absolute Resolve during the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife).

There is reasonable criticism that the huge military costs are not very effective, that the military-industrial complex lobbies expensive weapons instead of more useful mass and simple arms (Lachmann, 2020). One may claim that since China spends less, it has managed to overcome the U.S. in this critical field of strategic competition, and that the U.S. military budget and military planning in general are not living up to contemporary challenges. Recent American military interventions in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and in Iraq (2003–2021) were lengthy and failed to achieve their goals. In a tragic twist at the peak of Colin Powell’s political career, he had to abandon his own doctrine suggesting short and decisive military operations with clear and achievable goals and an effective exit strategy (Powell, 1992). However, although these wars ended in a protracted nightmare for the local populations and further aggravated the complicated situation in the Middle East, the unaccomplished goals were not vital for U.S. security, and the American casualties were much smaller than those in the Vietnam disaster. The current war against Iran might follow the same pattern, even though it demonstrates the danger of being a U.S. ally in the Middle East.

In a certain way, the U.S. still enjoys limited (if we recall the 9/11 attacks) ‘free security.’[10] Apart from the U.S. and China, only a few nations in the world can boast to have relative information and communication sovereignty, including autonomous messengers and payment systems. The current military conflict between Russia and Ukraine vividly demonstrates the importance of large armies and military technologies borne out by effective use of FPV drones and Starlink, a U.S.-made satellite Internet system. While not committing their soldiers to the field operations but supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces with its high-tech weapons and equipment, the U.S. is closely studying the ongoing military transformation.

Thus, the statistics and the recent international developments testify to the U.S.’s remarkable resilience.

The ‘unipolar era’ is over but there is no clear evidence of American decline. In fact, it is the spectacular rise of China which allows us to declare the end of the American unipolar domination.

China is challenging the strengths of the American economy, but has not yet surpassed it in information technologies, including AI; materials science; life science technologies (biotech), including medical research; pharmaceutics; genetics; and mass agriculture. The global finances are still revolving around New York. The costs of the Ukraine conflict, huge by European standards, are easily bearable by the American budget, and the fighting does not engage American soldiers. Moreover, the Trump administration has successfully forced its European allies to pay for the Ukrainian weapons supplies. The U.S. successfully controls the EU and even its large East Asian allies, like Japan and South Korea, to secure positions for struggle with China, in whatever form. Russia feels the strength and the grip of this control, but also the limits of U.S. hegemony. The last but not the least is the domination of American culture which continues growing: the English language now influences even the grammar, syntax, and phonetics of such long-established languages with rich literary and scholarly tradition as Russian: 49.6% of websites are English-language,[11] and the volume of English-language content on the Internet is probably larger. Generative AI systems, including even China’s DeepSeek, are trained using primarily English-language content.

Drawing analogies, the U.S.’s present position in the world should be compared not with the Soviet Union’s in the late 1980s or even with the Russian Federation’s in the early 1990s, but with that of Great Britain at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Remaining powerful, it ceded its first place in the global economy to the U.S., and on the eve of WWI it was surpassed also by Germany. Today, the U.S. is still stronger than Great Britain was in 1913. So, the best term to describe the U.S.’s current global position is relative hegemony.

For citation, please use:
Diskin, Ye.I., 2026. Digital Sovereigns and Vassals. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 142–167. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-142-167

In 2025, President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia had achieved full digital sovereignty, claiming that only three countries in the world were truly digitally sovereign: the U.S., China, and Russia (Kommersant, 2025). Earlier, in September 2025, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko also noted that the number of fully digitally sovereign countries was significantly smaller than the number of nuclear-armed states (Interfax, 2025). By claiming digital sovereignty, these ‘securitization moves’ (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998, p. 29) also imply the need to protect that sovereignty, permitting the state to take extraordinary measures for that purpose, given society’s recognition of the state’s responsibility for security.

Yet the present measures and level of control are apparently insufficient to counter external threats: foreign countries’ development of Direct-to-Cell technologies, extraterritorial pressure on digital platforms, and coercive exploitation of control over infrastructure all threaten digital sovereignty,[1] and can be countered only with foreign policy instruments.

The official statement regarding “cyber superpowers”[2] raises two major questions: 1) To what extent can control over digital technologies influence the structure of international relations? and 2) What does the status of a ‘digital superpower’ really mean, if defined formally? This article employs and develops Dmitry Anikin’s concept of multiple sovereignty (2025), while also utilizing structural realism, constructivism, securitization theory, and international regimes theory. This should unveil the nature and development of digital conflicts and outline the foreign policy decisions demanded by those conflicts.

To what extent do the ongoing political, economic, and technological conflicts,[3] between the leading digital powers, indicate the insufficiency of state instruments of control over the digital environment? What theoretical and practical factors demand the issue’s transfer into the foreign policy domain?

This study compares four country cases (the U.S., the EU, China, and Russia) featuring those factors. It also analyzes regulation of the digital sphere. Russia’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept defines its foreign policy priorities but does not sufficiently address protection of the country’s interests in the digital sphere, as demanded by other countries’ intensive development and use of digital technologies. Keeping digital technological development solely within the realm of domestic policy may hinder Russia’s efforts to build a fair multipolar world, as its main geopolitical rivals (above all the U.S.) maintain a threatening lead in digital technologies.

This article posits that Russia’s official claim of “full digital sovereignty”—merely discursive and stated in normative acts only implicitly—disregards threats emerging at the intersection of technology and social relations on the meso and macro levels. Foreign policy instruments are needed to parry such threats.

Sovereignty and the Digital Dimension

Understanding digital sovereignty requires understanding the main approaches to defining state sovereignty. Stephen Krasner identifies four types of sovereignty: domestic sovereignty, interdependence sovereignty, international legal sovereignty, and Westphalian sovereignty (Krasner, 1999, pp. 3-5). It is interdependence sovereignty, i.e., a state’s ability to control cross-border flows, that has come under the greatest pressure amid the digital transformation, since digital flows are inherently transboundary and difficult to control.

Scholarship on digital sovereignty is developing rapidly: Stefano Fratini et al. (2024) have systematized four competing models of its understanding; and Julia Pohle and Mauro Santaniello (2024) have recorded a shift in the discussion from descriptive to normative approaches. Digital sovereignty is being operationalized and becoming part of practical state policy rather than only an academic subject. This article continues in the same vein, suggesting consideration of digital sovereignty not as a state’s static characteristic, but as a process whose dynamics are determined by the interaction of domestic and foreign policy instruments.

John Agnew (1994) warned of the ‘territorial trap’: automatic equation of state sovereignty with territorial control. Cyberspace is the most vivid example of a mismatch between jurisdiction over digital platforms and territorial borders, and attempts to restore territorial control by blocking digital resources create serious risks (discussed below). John J. Ruggie described an ‘unbundling of territoriality’ in which political power and social interaction cease to be rigidly tied to physical borders, and states have to deal with forces and factors that cannot be reduced to ‘territorial solutions’ (Ruggie, 1993, pp. 149-151, 171-172). Ruggie suggested not a ‘disappearance of sovereignty,’ but the emergence of ‘multiperspective institutional forms’ in which authority is separated from exclusive territoriality (Ibid, p. 172). Digital sovereignty is a clear example of ‘unbundling’: the state seeks to restore control of an environment that cannot be reduced to physical space, and hence it is forced to create new, extraterritorial regulatory instruments (i.e., establish jurisdiction based on the number of users operating in the state’s territory). This approach has been adopted in the EU, Russia, the UK, and other countries.

Digital Securitization of Sovereignty

Securitization legitimizes extraordinary measures beyond the usual political process (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, 1998). Securitization targets various aspects of state sovereignty, and securitizing actors are heads of state and senior officials. Specific speech acts range from Putin’s statements about “three fully digitally sovereign countries,” to Macron’s remarks about the inadmissibility of “digital vassalage” (Le Monde, 2025a), to the Trump administration’s announcement that foreign regulation of American digital platforms threatens U.S. sovereignty (USDS, 2025).

All four digital powers securitize their digital sovereignty, but with varying reference objects, reflecting their varying normative approaches and strategic interests. The U.S. securitizes the freedom of its platforms from foreign regulation, i.e., defines control over the global digital infrastructure as an element of sovereignty. The EU securitizes technological independence and the integrity of users’ information. China securitizes ideological stability, declaring foreign platforms a source of destabilization. Russia securitizes the integrity of the national communication space. The fruits of securitization—legitimized extraordinary measures—thus also differ: e.g., blocking, personal sanctions against foreign officials, forced division of companies, and creation of alternative technological ecosystems.

Geoeconomics and ‘Weaponized Interdependence’

Edward Luttwak (1990) introduced ‘geoeconomics’ into scientific use to denote a shift from military-political to economic rivalry between states, even as the underlying logic of conflict remained in place. Digital platforms are the most effective tools of geoeconomic competition: they generate huge financial flows, control the global information space, and provide access to data increasingly viewed as a strategic resource. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris (2016) proposed the concept of economic statecraft. By handling huge financial flows and exercising monopoly control over access to infrastructure (operating systems, application stores, cloud services), platforms become tools of control, while remaining objects of state regulation. It is the economic importance of platforms that makes them one of the central elements of geoeconomic competition in the modern world.

The concept of ‘weaponized interdependence’ proposed by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2019) describes the mechanism by which global network structures—financial, informational, and infrastructural—asymmetrically advantage states that control these networks’ chokepoints. The U.S., through its technology companies, controls the global Internet infrastructure, search engines, mobile device operating systems, cloud services, and digital payment systems. It has thereby amassed an unprecedented arsenal of tools to employ the ‘panopticon effect’ (monitoring of transnational flows) and the ‘chokepoint effect’ (disconnection of other actors from networks). However, this power operates within a ‘regime complex’ (Nye, 2014, p. 7), and awareness of the threat has propelled others to seek digital sovereignty by sometimes radical means (see the next section).

The states challenging U.S. digital hegemony long sought to avoid direct confrontation, relying on domestic regulation such as legal restrictions, data localization requirements, and access-blocking. But the mounting pressure is forcing them to turn to foreign policy.

Susan Strange’s ‘power structures’—environments in which other actors must act (Strange, 1994, pp. 34, 165)—seem applicable to the role of multinational digital corporations such as Apple, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, X, Telegram, or Palantir. These corporations largely determine the architecture of digital interaction, content moderation rules, information dissemination algorithms, and data processing standards (de Bustos and Izquierdo-Castillo, 2019). Strange predicted “the retreat of the state” in the face of market forces (Strange, 1996, p. 141), but the opposite has occurred: states seek to establish control over the digital environment, which was initially formed outside of state regulation, using the entire arsenal of domestic and foreign policy instruments.

Securitization, geoeconomic competition, and control over key nodes are subject to regulation. Joseph Nye Jr. described global cyberspace governance as a ‘regime complex,’ a set of overlapping and often conflicting regimes regulating various aspects of the digital environment (Nye, 2014). This explains why states cannot achieve digital sovereignty alone, using only domestic policy: such efforts inevitably affect other states’ regimes. This is true of the U.S.’s power projection as well. The normative and functional confrontation between respective regimes, or ‘regime interdependence,’ calls for foreign policy instruments.

The Constructivist Dimension

According to the constructivist approach (see Wendt, 1999, p. 4; Katzenstein, 1996, p. 6), conflicts over digital sovereignty unfold not only in the material, but also in the normative[4] and discursive realms. Every actor constructs his own normative position, appealing to different values. The U.S. refers to freedom of speech and of entrepreneurship; the EU seeks to protect personal data and “counter disinformation and hatred” (EU Code, 2016); China upholds “cyber sovereignty” as an element of public administration; Russia prioritizes the “protection of the national information space from external interference.” The clash of these narratives creates a situation where all parties appeal to sovereignty but construe it differently. This indirectly bears out the thesis of Julia Pohle and Torsten Thiel (2020), that digital sovereignty is not so much a regulatory or organizational tool, but a discursive instrument of political argumentation, which is filled with different normative content dependent on the actor’s position and interests.

Digital Sovereignty and Conflicts Related to Its Protection

The Trump administration’s unrestrained and unilateral behavior is forcing the U.S.’s traditional allies—such as the EU, the UK, and even Canada—to speak of the “end of the rules-based order,” to discuss enhancing “strategic autonomy” (Carney, 2026), and to reconsider their attitudes to the 20-year-long dominance of American digital platforms, which all actors now see as tools of control and coercion. Escaping ‘surveillance and strangulation’ is becoming an urgent task. However, its implementation is encountering numerous legal and technological difficulties, primarily the need to build relationships with the technology giants, which operate as transnational actors despite being registered in specific jurisdictions (mainly in the U.S.) (de Bustos and Izquierdo-Castillo, 2019). These corporations are unprecedentedly important to the global technological infrastructure (Diskin, 2025a), and interaction with them requires both political will and certain national technological capabilities.

The EU AND the U.S.: Regulatory Sovereignty vs. Structural Dependence

On 18 November 2025, Berlin hosted a special EU summit on digital sovereignty, where French President Emmanuel Macron said: “We do not want to be digital vassals of the U.S. or China” (Le Monde, 2025a). In fact, Macron defined dependence on foreign platforms as an existential threat, which can be treated as an attempt at securitization. However, statements alone are not enough to escape strangulation and the panopticon, and accrued dependence cannot be overcome overnight, especially absent the political will and resources for a major leap forward. Miguel De Bruycker, Managing Director General of the Centre of Cybersecurity for Belgium, maintains that “Europe has lost the Internet,” and the EU’s attempts to restrict leading American digital platforms are irrelevant; the bloc needs its own competitive products (RBC, 2026a). “Instead of putting that focus on how we can stop the U.S. ‘hyperscalers,’ maybe we put our energy in…building up something by ourselves?” (The Brussels Times, 2026).

Nevertheless, the EU’s recent measures have noticeably affected its relations with U.S. tech corporations, which are estimated to have lost $97.6 billion from European regulations and special taxation (Schramm, 2025). When the EU uses ‘economic statecraft,’ such as regulatory pressure on foreign actors (Baldwin, 2020, pp. 28-29), the U.S. responds with ‘digital mercantilism’ (Wheeler, 2025), i.e., Luttwak’s geoeconomics.

The EU has established a legal system covering almost all areas of digitalization: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the complementary Digital Services Act (DSA).[5]

Extraterritorial application of European norms has the ‘Brussels effect’ (Bradford, p. 25): global corporations align their practices with EU norms even beyond the EU’s borders. Establishing jurisdiction over foreign platforms based on the number of users in the EU is essentially an attempt to escape the ‘territorial trap’: the state asserts control not over the territory hosting servers with user data, but over the audience physically located within the state’s borders.

But, while this mechanism is effective in pressuring industry, it is reaching the limit of impact on U.S. behavior, as borne out by Macron’s words about the inadmissibility of digital vassalage and by the adoption of the Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty (Declaration, 2025).

The EU has realized, albeit quite late, that digital sovereignty cannot be achieved solely by improving regulatory mechanisms, and that it needs its own digital platforms, cloud data services, AI, and other technological infrastructure.

According to a report to the European Parliament, 80 percent of digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property used in the EU have been created outside it (Report, 2025). In fact, the EU does not have major messengers, social networks, or marketplaces. Its most successful social network is France’s BeReal with 40 million monthly users (Silberling, 2025), which pales even compared to Russia’s VK, with 92 million monthly users (VK, 2025). Thus, any online discourse significant to the EU will be conducted overwhelmingly on platforms created outside its borders, within the U.S.’s panopticon. Also, Apple and Google, as the owners of mobile operating systems,[6] have structural power (in Strange’s terminology) over all digital market participants: any national application, messenger, or service operates only insofar as it has access to their ecosystems.[7] In other words, dependence on the U.S. in this field is just as great as it is in the field of armaments, even though the European Commission has its own executive vice-president for tech sovereignty (Henna Virkkunen). Nevertheless, the Europeans remain committed to determining their own regulatory frameworks and are even planning to ban digital platforms close to Trump if he moves to seize Greenland (Gutteridge and Barnes, 2026).

The EU’s public statements, regulatory measures, and fines against American companies have frustrated many officials in the U.S., not only in the Trump administration but also in some think tanks, in particular the right-libertarian Cato Institute (Inserra, 2025). The incumbent American administration’s actions clearly show that the digital track is one of its priorities. U.S. sanctions against European Commissioner Thierry Breton, and against four NGO functionaries associated with the EU’s digital policy, strongly signify a transformation of U.S.-EU relations in this area. The U.S. Secretary of State has emphasized the inadmissibility of violating U.S. sovereignty in cyberspace (Rubio, 2025). This is a manifestation of ‘weaponized interdependence’ (Farrell and Newman, 2019): the U.S. uses control over key global digital infrastructure nodes to coerce partners and uses sanctions to retain that control.

The explicit clash of narratives is an important point: the sanctioned heads of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the Global Disinformation Index, and Hate Aid play a major role in the implementation of the EU policy of “countering disinformation” (Diskin, 2025b, pp. 417-419). The White House has blasted their activities as “radical activism of the global censorship-industrial complex” (Rubio, 2025). This narrative is also supported by Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who has accused Macron and Breton of building a “digital Gulag” (Durov, 2025). This is essentially a clash of two incompatible narratives and regulatory orders: the U.S.’s freedom of speech, legitimizing personal sanctions, versus the EU’s fight against hatred and disinformation (EU Code, 2016), which has been ratified by EU Parliament laws (Le Monde, 2025b) and which legitimizes fines and regulatory directives.

Note that this study aims to identify the parties’ points of conflict, narratives, and tools, not to adjudge their correctness.

China and the U.S.: TikTok and Geoeconomic Coercion

China has long pursued digital autonomy, having built a system of control over its internal information space.

But prioritization of the manufacturing sector, and the sustainment of domestic demand for it, has shifted government and corporate attention to the development of online shopping. China has the world’s largest online shopping market (Xinhua, 2026) and is rapidly conquering those of other countries (Haleem, 2026).

Meanwhile, Chinese social networks such as Weibo, QQ, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili are virtually nonexistent outside of China, due to regulatory costs and cultural and language barriers. A major exception is TikTok, with a global audience of 1.59 billion users as of the beginning of 2025 (Statista, 2025).

The conflict over TikTok, the international “mirror” of China’s Douyin platform, is particularly significant. Of the platform’s 1.59 billion users, 135 million are in the U.S.. Trump threatened to block TikTok even during his first term (AP News, 2020), but his order was blocked by a district court[8] and overturned by the Biden administration. After returning to the White House in 2025, Trump forced TikTok to split its U.S. branch into an independent legal entity under U.S. control. Such a forced separation should be considered an instrument of state policy.

It seems that Beijing made concessions on TikTok because it needed to maintain access to the U.S. digital advertising and consumer content market.

But it is unlikely to do the same regarding marketplaces, as they have strategic economic importance to China, providing it with economic leverage (Drezner, 2021) and other benefits described by Farrell and Newman (2019).

Control over the external information space is still of secondary importance for China, but pressure on Chinese companies abroad (e.g., TikTok) is forcing Beijing to make foreign policy decisions. The isolation of its internal information space has not eliminated the need for foreign policy tools.

Russia: Technological Autarky and the Dilemma of Control

Long before the EU did, Russia faced the issue of dependence on foreign digital platforms, and began developing its own replacements.

Unlike in the EU, Russian platforms’ market share was quite significant even before the mass blocking of foreign resources. In 2022-2023, the search engine Yandex controlled 49% of the market, versus Google’s 47%, notwithstanding the far greater resources and unrestricted status of the latter (AdIndex, 2023; Blunt, 2025). VKontakte remains the flagship Russian social network (VK, 2022). Russian marketplaces accounted for 62% of e-commerce in 2021 (Bakharev, 2022). Putin’s description of digital sovereignty, as a pool of national competitive platforms, is therefore accurate.

But digital sovereignty should also be understood as requiring emancipation from the aforementioned ‘strangulating control’ and ‘panopticon effect,’ which continue to plague Russia and Russians’ communication with one another.

Russia remains in an unprecedentedly intense conflict with the U.S. and the EU over control of Russia’s own cyberspace. Western countries censor Russian official resources and state-owned media by blocking them on their platforms and in EU jurisdictions in 2022-2023 (AiF, 2022; TASS, 2024), a process that began long before the Special Military Operation (TASS, 2019). The normalization of Russia’s relations with U.S. tech giants remains conceivable, but this would likely require a comprehensive peace process,[9] and it is unclear what to do with a company that has been designated as extremist, or with fines that have exceeded the entire global money supply (e.g., for not complying with court orders to restore Russian TV channels on YouTube (Zvezda, Channel One, VGTRK, NTV, RT, and others)(RBC, 2024).

There has emerged a tendency towards ‘technological autarchy.’[10] LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram,[11] YouTube, Signal, Discord, Viber, WhatsApp, Roblox, FaceTime, and Snapchat have all been slowed or blocked in Russia since 2016. Government officials affirm that the current approach is the right way to enforce legislation (Gorelkin, 2025), but there have been no significant signs of foreign platforms’ behavior changing since February 2022. Even when the authorities indicated success in negotiations with Roblox, with a (mainly child) audience in Russia of 18 million (Lantsov, 2025), the service remained blocked as of May 2026 (RIA, 2026a). This provoked discontent: the head of the Safe Internet League, Yekaterina Mizulina, received 63,000 complaints from children and their parents about Roblox alone, which she forwarded to the Roskomnadzor agency (Mizulina, 2025). Many more are concerned by Telegram’s blocking (Gudoshnikov, 2026).

This exposes the growing gap between the securitization of sovereignty and the effectiveness of extraordinary measures taken to ensure it: with the threat to sovereignty defined as existential, emergency measures (blocking) are formally legitimized, but uncontrollable side effects—emigration of specialists, growing discontent, and technological lag—limit that legitimation and create new security threats. Thus, measures to strengthen security in one area (communication) impair security in other areas (technological development, social stability). Alternative tools, including in foreign policy, must be considered. The current approach is increasingly ineffective and even counterproductive, leading to paradoxical results, like the purchase of VPNs by some regional administrations (Okhotnikova, 2026).

The Exhaustion of Tools for State Control

The most intense conflicts over digital sovereignty illustrate that domestic policy tools, alone, are increasingly incapable of resolving such disputes. For the EU, such tools have proven to be too weak, failing to facilitate the emergence of its own platforms. For Russia, such tools have been counterproductive: blocking has uncontrollable side effects. For China, such tools have proven sufficient to protect its domestic market, but unable to protect its companies abroad. And, for the U.S., such tools cannot overcome the increasing resistance to its extraterritorial imposition of norms. In fact, all four parties are in an intense conflict—between West and East, and also between the U.S. (under Trump) and the EU.

Regarding Russia in particular, comparison with the U.S. is telling. The U.S.’s mandatory division of TikTok was legitimized as an emergency measure to protect 135 million Americans from the control of a foreign power. TikTok was already operating under U.S. jurisdiction,[12] but now it will be managed by U.S. investors, giving the U.S. real control (Khushboo and Han, 2025). Russia blocked Meta platforms (Instagram and Facebook) for similar reasons,[13] but with diametrically opposite results: while the U.S. acquired control over TikTok within its borders, Russia lost access to audiences beyond its borders, as there is no Russian alternative with similar global reach.[14] Telegram’s blocking also raised a wave of criticism among military bloggers, officials, and entrepreneurs (RBC, 2026a). The asymmetry of results is explained by the difference in negotiating power: the U.S. controls key infrastructure nodes, which allows it to impose its conditions, while Russia can only isolate itself.

For Russia, this is a major conflict, whose outcome will greatly affect Russia’s digital market and technologies. In the worst case, serious political instability may be generated if successive bans on foreign services eliminate the ability to project national content and narratives, deprive Russians of personal digital communication with the outside world, and exclude them from the global digital agenda and discourse. This risk has not yet been adequately reflected in strategic documents.

Russia’s current digital foreign policy is defined in Para 30 of the Foreign Policy Concept, which declares the goal of the “safe and stable functioning and development of the Internet, based on the equal participation of states in its governance and…preventing the establishment of foreign control over [the Internet’s] national segments.” This is vague and somewhat outdated. It repeats the logic of Federal Law 90-FZ of 1 May 2019 (known as the Sovereign Runet Law) (Zhukov and Shugunov, 2020), but the risk of Russia being cut off from the global Internet is less than it was in 2019, thanks to technical measures taken since then.

The Foundations of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of International Information Security considers many threats, mainly criminal ones (Presidential Decree, 2021). But the document was written so as to motivate certain UN convention that was indeed passed in December 2024 (Convention, 2024), and has little relevance beyond that.

The threats facing Russia are not limited to crime or an externally imposed Internet cutoff. One of the greatest threats is that escalating internal blocking could partly disconnect the Russian and foreign segments of the Internet. Moreover, even a complete disconnection would have limited utility, given almost nondisruptable Direct-to-Cell technology. The January 2026 unrest in Iran, fueled by Starlink’s provision of ‘pirate’ Internet, shows the U.S.’s ability to overcome blocking in any state—even the UK (GB News, 2026).

Meanwhile the Americans are upgrading their capabilities: Starlink is actively developing the Direct-to-Cell space communication technology, which does not require any terminals or satellite dishes—an LTE-enabled smartphone gets connected directly to a satellite (Starlink, 2025). The last smartphones lacking LTE support were sold more than 15 years ago, and LTE occupies 96-97% of Russia’s mobile network (Kotov, 2024). Suppressing such access would require either jamming all LTE/5G[15] cellular bands, or manually examining all mobile devices, which seems impossible (3side, 2025). Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell technology is essentially a new ‘weapon of interdependence’ that significantly enhances the ‘panopticon’ and creates a fundamentally new mechanism for ‘penetration.’ Although Russia is developing its own satellite communication systems, it still lacks comparable capabilities (RBC, 2026b).

Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell technology vividly illustrates the ‘unbundling of territoriality’: the state loses control as access ceases to be routed solely through ground infrastructure.

In Russia’s reincorporated regions, a response is needed to Starlink’s plans to activate Direct-to-Cell in what it considers to be Ukrainian territory (Reuters, 2025). The subject must be included in any negotiations on Ukraine. In December 2025, Russia called an informal meeting of the UN Security Council, demanding that satellite communication services respect the sovereignty of other states (Vedomosti, 2026). This was an attempt to work out basic principles for the international regulation of satellite communications, but its success will require broad international support along with pressure on SpaceX.

Possibilities for Institutionalization

The above-described conflicts over digital sovereignty cannot be resolved by the U.S., the EU, Russia, or China by solely domestic means.

The aforementioned ‘regime complex’ determines which institutional forms are available to foreign policy (Nye, 2014). Forming an integrated regime is hampered by contradictions between the (Russia- and China-supported) multilateral model of Internet governance, and the (U.S.- and to a lesser extent EU-supported) multistakeholder model, which entails the participation of all stakeholders, including non-state actors (see: Mueller, 2010; Zinovieva and Shitkov, 2024). The evolution of the regime complex, currently halfway between complete fragmentation and a single coherent legal structure, may be the most likely scenario (Nye, 2014, p. 16). But the current trajectory is clearly towards fragmentation, partly due to states’ reliance on domestic political instruments to ensure digital sovereignty (RBC, 2026c).

Our theoretical analysis suggests several foreign policy options for the Foreign Ministry, the Security Council, expert groups, and negotiation platforms.

First, in negotiations with the U.S., Russia should raise the issue of U.S. digital platforms’ future operation in Russia. The U.S. may raise this issue itself, but its negotiating position should be understood in advance. Russia’s blocking of foreign platforms limits the benefits, derived by the U.S. from its technological advantage, and emphasizing U.S. companies’ losses may strengthen Russia’s negotiating position.

Second, Russia should strengthen practical cooperation with BRICS+ and the SCO, and internationally discuss threats to Internet governance and the risks of pursuing digital sovereignty through blocking alone. Russia and China could promote their digital platforms as alternatives to American ones, provide them to BRICS+ countries, and exchange experience and competencies. The purpose is to form an alternative (regional, not universal) regime complex that ensures a minimum level of cooperation and harmonization of standards.

Third, when attempts are made on foreign platforms to discredit Russian culture, language, and history, or to persecute Russian users, such attempts must be opposed. But this is possible only through effective international cooperation on digital regulation, a task that has not yet been properly articulated. Foreign digital platforms may be influenced through administrative pressure in reputationally sensitive areas, prosecution for campaigns that violate Russians’ rights, and mass lawsuits by affected users in foreign courts. Other measures should include cooperation with BRICS+ and SCO members in digital regulation, public campaigns to disclose illegal activities of individuals and organizations affiliated with foreign platforms, and the pursuit of modifications to international law by promoting joint legal positions in relevant intergovernmental organizations.

Fourth, the areas of legal cooperation should be expanded: the CIS, SCO, and BRICS+ platforms should be employed to pursue amendment of the UN Convention against Cybercrime, so that it includes provisions on mutual assistance in prosecuting information warfare, terrorist propaganda, and the incitement of interethnic and interreligious hatred.

Finally, a permanent BRICS+/SCO mechanism for cyberspace governance should be created. It may serve as the prototype for a new international regime. Internet access beyond the state’s control threatens not only Russia: the aforementioned forays against the UK and Iran (Times of India, 2026) may indicate that the U.S. is preparing such campaigns against any country seen as threatening American digital platforms.

*  *  *

The above analysis yields several general conclusions.

First. Conflicts over digital sovereignty between the leading digital powers—the U.S., EU, China, and Russia—are not isolated episodes, but the products of a structural shift in international relations. Theories of securitization (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998), geoeconomics (Luttwak, 1990; Blackwill and Harris, 2016), of interdependence-weaponization (Farrell and Newman, 2019), and of international regimes (Krasner, 1983; NYE, 2014) reveal the patterns underlying these conflicts and predict their development.

Second. All four considered great powers are approaching the limits of their tools’ effectiveness, and now face insufficiency (the EU), counterproductivity (Russia), ‘defensive’ ineffectiveness abroad (China), and ‘offensive’ ineffectiveness abroad (the U.S.). No actor can rely solely on domestic policy tools, and all must adopt some foreign policy instruments.

Third. Russia’s current strategic documents—the Foreign Policy Concept and The Foundations of State Policy in the Field of International Information Security—do not fully reflect the described dynamics. Their focus on countering cybercrime, and on external disconnection of the Runet, needs to be significantly expanded to account for new technologies like Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell.

Fourth. Digital issues should be institutionalized as an independent area of Russia’s foreign policy. Priorities should be defined in strategic documents, negotiating positions should be formulated, and mechanisms for international cooperation (bilateral and within BRICS+ and the SCO) should be developed.

The global Internet’s increasing fragmentation—contrary to the integration that prevailed at the beginning of the 21st century—is dragging the contours of digital space out of alignment with national development. To avoid becoming one of the losers in this process, Russia must transition from reactive domestic policy to a proactive foreign policy strategy.

This article is a product of the HSE-BR-2025-001 research project within the HSE Basic Research Program.

For citation, please use:
Toloraya, G.D., 2026. A Military Stress Test for BRICS. Russia in Global Affairs, 24(3), pp. 186–192. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2026-24-3-186-192

The unprovoked U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran, which has undermined the foundations of international law and the established world order, is the first serious stress test for the newly expanded BRICS. The organization’s 2024–2025 enlargement (Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia) has been widely recognized as a historic success in building a platform for the World Majority, but has also shown that BRICS institutions are unprepared for conflict situations. The war has placed Iran and the UAE on opposite sides, while BRICS as a whole has no unified position.

BRICS members were divided in voting on anti-Iranian UN Resolution 2817. Russia and China abstained, while India and the UAE coauthored the resolution. Brazil adopted a moderate stance, although it condemned the strikes on Iran, as did South Africa. Egypt, conversely, condemned strikes against “brotherly Arab nations.” Ethiopia expressed concern primarily over its own energy security. BRICS consultations in New Delhi (24 April 2026) could not produce a joint statement, and instead ended with a brief summary from the Chairman acknowledging an internal split. The BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting (the organization’s second-most-important annual gathering), held in mid-May in New Delhi, also failed to overcome these divisions, ending with a non-consensus Chairman’s Statement noting disagreement, on a number of points, of certain (publicly known) members.[1]

In effect, three camps have emerged within BRICS. The ‘sovereign-legal’ group (Russia, China, Brazil, and South Africa) condemns the U.S.-Israeli attack. The ‘regional-strategic’ group (India, Egypt, and Ethiopia) is primarily concerned with its own security and energy supplies. Iran, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia (as a ‘half-member’) are themselves parties to the conflict.

There are also other smoldering conflicts, e.g., between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile.

This situation is unprecedented: previous clashes, e.g., between China and India, were kept contained, unable to interfere with long-term BRICS projects.

This has prompted a degree of schadenfreude in the West. As a Singaporean-based expert notes, BRICS is able to agree more on reformist language than on “a common posture when conflict threatens to impact concrete national interests.” (Hussein, 2026) The core principles of BRICS—consensus, respect for sovereignty, and pragmatism—function in peacetime, but paralyze decision-making during disorder and confrontation. A fundamental flaw has been exposed in the “minimalist institutionalism” of which BRICS has been so proud—for it grants rights and benefits without obligations, flexibility without diktat, which is precisely what attracts so many new applicants and aspiring members.

A secondary consequence of the war for BRICS has been an energy and financial split: disruptions in energy markets benefit some members (including Russia), but are detrimental to the majority. Furthermore, the tightening sanctions against Iran and its supporters have forced BRICS members to choose between risking secondary sanctions or distancing themselves from Tehran. These frictions notwithstanding, the war may accelerate de-dollarization and promote the creation of independent payment and settlement systems within BRICS—one of its key objectives.

Possible Trajectories for BRICS

In Russia, some experts insist on BRICS’s development based on the ‘lowest common denominator,’ while others argue that BRICS must become a fully-fledged institution of global governance, or the world will become increasingly chaotic, many World Majority countries will become less stable and secure, and BRICS itself will lose its attractiveness and influence (Karaganov et al., 2026).

In some Russian publications, the baseline scenario is one of ambition and reform, in which BRICS becomes a “central institution of the World Majority,” capable of filling the vacuum in global governance (Karaganov et al., 2026). Achieving this demands progress in seven areas: financial settlements (the prototype Mariana system); disaster response (BRICS Rescue); a new climate agenda (BRICS Nature); an analogue to the IEA (BRICS Power); food security (BRICS Feed); dialogue on military AI; and normative and educational cooperation. Further expansion of the agenda is probably undesirable.

However, although these issues are well-chosen and merit vigorous effort, the war may badly injure BRICS’s developing organism.

Hastily expanded on the eve of a global storm, BRICS and its new partners have encountered challenges of a magnitude that they cannot ignore. Nor can they discount more pessimistic scenarios.

The first of those is BRICS’s fragmentation (‘G20-ization’): degradation into yet another geopolitically lightweight forum containing several opposing factions. Political and security issues would be displaced by economic, climate, trade, and humanitarian ones, as in the early stages of BRICS’s formation. Two wings could emerge within BRICS—a pro-Western one and an “irreconcilable” one.

The second option is BRICS’s ‘Sinicization,’ discussed in the West. If Russia weakens, or India and others become more dependent upon the West given deepening geopolitical rifts, then collapse may threaten BRICS, and China may be compelled to become arbiter and security guarantor, offering technological and diplomatic support to BRICS members. The influence of Russia and other members would then decline, BRICS would become an instrument of Chinese foreign policy, and some members might withdraw or maintain only a formal association.

A more realistic scenario is a ‘two-speed BRICS,’ comprising an anti-Western core (China, Russia, and Iran) and an opportunistically hedging periphery (India, Brazil, the UAE, South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia). This would entail differing directions and levels of integration: the core would deepen geopolitical, security, and even military cooperation, while the periphery would participate only in economic and humanitarian projects. Developments such as India’s ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ with Israel (February 2026), and the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC, point in this direction.

Naturally, any of these scenarios would also affect the BRICS partner countries, which would also choose varying models and factions.

How Can the Situation Be Remedied?

The Gulf crisis may be a moment of truth, not a death sentence. The U.S.’s behavior under Donald Trump—including aggression against Iran and Venezuela, threats against Cuba, tariff wars, and pressure on South Africa to leave BRICS—may temporarily paralyze BRICS, but it also incentivizes BRICS consolidation. Yet BRICS should not and cannot become an anti-Western bloc, as this would diminish its attractiveness for many World Majority countries that do not wish to choose between the U.S. and China.

BRICS now faces a choice: to remain a talk-shop and gradually lose relevance or evolve into a conflict-response mechanism. If the bloc fails to propose an alternative security model (not necessarily a military alliance, but a diplomatic platform for conflict prevention), then its less influential members and partners will seek guarantees directly from the U.S. or China. BRICS would then become a declarative club, while real influence would shift to bilateral alliances—especially if the West, driven to prolong its dominance and exploitation, overcomes its internal contradictions as it did in the past.

Thus, in order to remain relevant, BRICS must establish permanent structures for mediation, monitoring, and coordination of security issues. This should be done together with deeper financial and payment integration (central banks’ digital currencies and BRICS Pay may gain momentum precisely as a means of insulating against dollar-based sanctions). The energy dimension may also play a role: the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC could trigger a domino effect and a restructuring of the global energy market. BRICS, encompassing both energy producers and consumers, could become a new platform for coordination in this sphere. AI and cybersecurity, developed independently of the West, may likewise serve as instruments of consolidation.

A Bureaucratic Remedy

BRICS must be based on ‘soft institutionalization,’ seeking not a unified alliance, but a flexible multi-level structure.

For years, I have argued for BRICS’s urgent evolutionary institutionalization, beginning with the creation of bureaucratic mechanisms for coordination, monitoring, and preservation of institutional memory (Toloraya and Nikonov, 2013; Toloraya, 2015; Toloraya and Chukov, 2016).

Previously, ‘minimalist institutionalism’ provided flexibility and lowered the barrier to entry for new members. But the enduring rejection of bureaucracy is now causing a lack of continuity. Each chair country shapes the agenda according to its own priorities; previous decisions often remain unimplemented; and what institutional memory there is depends on the enthusiasm of individual states (namely Russia). With the addition of four/five members plus partners, the problem has become critical. New members are unfamiliar with the history of the BRICS agenda, and some lack the bureaucratic resources needed to manage chairmanships involving hundreds of events (Karaganov et al, 2026).

How could ‘soft institutionalization’ be realized? Proposals for a secretariat, divided between members, are detached from the reality of international organizations’ bureaucratic functioning. A BRICS Secretary-General, with few meaningful powers and a geographically dispersed staff, would be little more than a façade.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. A compact secretariat is needed, composed of one D-2 (per UN classification) official from each member, plus one D-1 or P-5 official from each partner. Some administrators (P-2 to P-4) would also be needed, with national quotas (like budgetary contributions) determined by a formula based on population size and GDP per capita. There should also be a technical staff recruited without quotas (G1–G7). The head of the secretariat would be appointed for a one-year term from the chair country and would, inter alia, be responsible for liaison with the chair’s government. The budget for 50–60 staff can be easily estimated.

A physical headquarters would be most effective, preferably located in a relatively neutral setting. Potential examples include Macau or Goa, which are distant from national capitals and (thanks to Portuguese) feature two BRICS languages. Of course, the secretariat may also have branches in national capitals, staffed, inter alia, by locals, if the host country is willing to finance them.

The technical secretariat would perform a limited set of functions, including:

• monitor the implementation of decisions, maintain documentation, and prepare reports and recommendations for leaders and governments;
• in cooperation with the chair country, prepare meeting agendas and the accompanying briefing and analytical materials;
• coordinate the work of the various sectoral tracks;
• maintain contacts with global and regional international organizations;
• organize training and capacity-building for partners, new members, and the ‘Friends of BRICS Club.’

This would still leave BRICS far short of a classical international organization with binding obligations and supranational bodies, and its members should not fear the emergence of diktat like in the EU. But such a mechanism may be sufficient for BRICS to pass the stress test of the current crisis, develop its own governance system, establish a crisis-response mechanism, pursue a common strategy—and even aspire to the role of global arbiter.

This article is an edited version of the paper written for the Valdai Discussion Club, https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/military-stress-test-the-war-on-iran-and-brics/