Echoes of Empire: Assessing the Impact of Russian Authority-Building and Coercive Strategies on the Geopolitical Orientation of Post-Soviet Target States

Abstract

Russia’s recent military incursions into Georgia and Ukraine have brought Moscow’s regional policy in the post-Soviet space to international attention. As the European Union’s eastern enlargement brings its ever closer to a geopolitical confrontation with Russia, policymakers will require a nuanced understanding of Russia’s regional strategies for securing influence. While Russia’s increasingly aggressive strategies have effectively destabilized the post-Soviet space and spread fears of Russia’s latent imperialism among the former Soviet republics, this thesis is guided by the following question: How do different Russian influence strategies impact the geopolitical orientation of and compliance outcomes in the target state?

This thesis systematically assesses the impact of different influence strategies undertaken by Russia on the target state’s geopolitical orientation as a proxy measure for Moscow’s influence over the state’s foreign policy development. It first constructs a theoretical framework grounded in David Lake’s hierarchical theory of interstate relations to sort Russia’s influence strategies into two categories: authority-building and coercion. This thesis also deduces a set of hypotheses from this hierarchical framework and tests them across three case studies (Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine), gauging the effectiveness of authority-building and coercive strategies against a single metric: the resulting geopolitical orientation of the target state. Each case study grounds its qualitative analysis of Russia’s influence strategies in a quantitative measure of geopolitical orientation in order to provide a more robust assessment of the strategies’ impact. This measure was built by examining the divergence between the ideal points of the target state as compared to those of Russia and the European Union over time, calculated based on voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly. The case studies also test alternative hypotheses grounded in non-hierarchical theories of international relations to challenge the core framework put forward by this thesis and assess the viability of coercive strategies in the post-Soviet space.

As a whole, this thesis shows that authority-building strategies are more effective than coercion at securing Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet space and inducing geopolitical alignment on the part of the target state. Even after accounting for variations in Russia’s structural capabilities to project coercive power, gauged through military advantage, and the costs of noncompliance imposed by coercive measures, coercive strategies fail to induce geopolitical alignment with Russia. This thesis also found that Russia’s reliance on coercion accelerates the target states’ realignment with the European Union. These findings demonstrate that Russia’s current coercive strategy in the post-Soviet space, exemplified by the annexation of Crimea and war in Eastern Ukraine, is not a viable means of securing Moscow’s influence in the region.