Is Putin losing everything else in his quest for Ukraine?

Foreign Policy advances that view….

All these developments—Transnistria going dark, Georgia turning turbulent, and Belarus once again facing the same ingredients that sparked its largest pro-democracy protests just a few years ago—would be newsworthy on their own. But it’s the fact that the primary backer of Transnistria separatists, Georgian illiberals, and Lukashenko’s regime are suddenly watching their external influence erode that presents new opportunities for the West, if only Brussels, London, and Washington take advantage.

Indeed, it is somewhat shocking that the West hasn’t sketched out a better strategy for the broader region in recent months. The European Union has continued encouraging Moldova’s pro-EU direction, but the West remains effectively a nonactor when it comes to things like Transnistria. In Georgia, the United States recently sanctioned Bidzina Ivanishvili, the architect of the country’s democratic decline, but it’s clear that there’s little strategy beyond these kinds of individual responses. And Belarus, meanwhile, is effectively a black hole of policy analysis, even for the new administration in Washington. Reams of paper have been produced on new U.S. strategy regarding Ukraine, Russia, and Europe, but there’s been precisely nothing written on Belarus, which appears to be a complete vacuum of strategic thinking.

And that’s all a shame and an opportunity foregone. After all, it’s not just people like Assad suddenly learning that Putin’s support apparently comes with an expiration date. Transnistria separatists, Georgia’s budding autocrats, Belarus’s thug-in-chief—all of them have suddenly realized that Putin’s backing, even for them, isn’t bottomless. As they’ve seen, the Russian president will always, always prioritize Ukraine over Russian interests elsewhere, including client regimes and kleptocratic allies along Russia’s other borders.

This is, of course, a trend that has been years in the making. For over a decade, Putin has prioritized subjugating Ukraine over Moscow’s other key strategic goals, dating all the way back to the creation—and immediate implosion—of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. In the years since, Putin has prioritized the gelding of Ukraine over everything from a viable economy to stable relations with the West, even to the point of risking regime stability itself. Indeed, at this point, it’s fair to say that Putin may well choose domination of Ukraine over even places like Sakha or Chechnya, both of which remain part of the Russian Federation for the time being but have clear histories as separate, sovereign states—one of the primary reasons that Russia’s territorial stability is hardly guaranteed, or why, as the Economist said, Putin is “turning Russia into a failed state.”

Questions and crises of Russia’s internal stability are still a ways off. But that is, ultimately, where this accelerating collapse of dominoes is heading. That is all the more reason the West must begin formulating policy not just on the next dominoes to fall—places like Transnistria, Georgia, and even Belarus—but also on what a post-Putin Russia may well, and should, look like. After all, once they start tumbling, dominoes have a way of continuing to fall. The West should be ready….

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