Russia's Strategy

Using business, proxies & social media to rebuild a repressive empire

(Trump and Putin at their summit in Helsinki on July 16th, 2018 where Trump admitted he trusted Russian more than US intelligence agencies.)

Russia’s reliance on proxies like Trump is nothing new. Moscow’s Bolshevik, Stalinist and now fascist regimes have pursued the same strategy for over a century.

They seek to impose their empire by guile or force by partnering with autocrats who enable them and weakening democracies that prevent them.

In the years after the 1917 revolution and the 1920s, this involved endless schemes with communists, nationalists and other revolutionaries in dozens of countries. During and after the Second World War, it relied on an alliance with Nazi Germany and a postwar Soviet military occupation of half of Europe.

Faced with reduced borders after 1991, Russia waged two wars against Chechen separatists, ending in 2005. Moscow then asserted control over eleven former soviet socialist republics, but failed in every case except Belarus.

By 2007, all former member states of the Warsaw Pact plus three Baltic states had joined NATO and the EU. They were only able to do this because Moscow lacked the coercive power to stop them. Finland and Sweden also later joined NATO.