Editor's note:
This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “ The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott.
Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immediate aim was regime change in Kyiv and Ukraine’s subjugation to Russian domination.
But Putin had much broader goals too.
He viewed victory over Ukraine as the first step in undoing the post-Cold-War order which had deprived Russia of its Soviet republics and sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
He sees the Ukraine war as a battle between Russia, NATO, and the “collective West.” Moscow’s victory over Kyiv would, he is convinced, start the process of dismantling an international order that he believes has ignored Russia’s national interests and belittled its position in the world.
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin has yet to achieve these goals.
But Russia has increased its influence in parts of the Global South and has allied itself with three revisionist powers—China, Iran, and North Korea—which share its commitment to a “post-Western” order.
The advent of the second Trump administration—which is committed to upending America’s alliances and robustly engaging in great power politics—has introduced a new element of uncertainty about how Russia might parlay its war with Ukraine into raising its global standing.
From Putin’s point of view, the reestablishment of U.S.-Russian relations under President Donald Trump and the prospect of restoring economic ties are bonuses that were not available before November 2024 and could offer new opportunities for him on the global stage.
Russia’s global position prior to February 24, 2022
Putin’s resentment of the United States has been festering for two decades.
His first public denunciation of the United States and its refusal to recognize what he regards as Russia’s interests and ambitions came in his 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference.
Thereafter—and despite the Obama administration’s attempts to reset relations—ties remained tense.
In the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its launch of a war in the Donbas through Russian separatist proxies in 2014, Russia’s relations with much of the West were on a downward spiral.
Russia was ejected from the G8, and U.S. and European financial and personal sanctions imposed in 2014 have adversely affected the Russian economy.
However, Russia’s counter-sanctions on the European Union (EU) boosted Russia’s own agricultural sector.
Despite deteriorating relations with the West, Germany and other European countries continued to import Russian gas—providing 55% of Germany’s gas consumption.
The Nord Stream II gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea was completed, and Germany was set to increase its dependence on Russian gas.
The Kremlin greeted Trump’s 2016 election with enthusiasm, but despite Trump’s positive comments about Putin, the net result of his first term was disappointing for Russia.
There were waves of sanctions, the U.S. withdrawal from both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties, and no progress was made on strategic stability talks.
Then COVID-19 hit, and Putin became increasingly isolated, sequestered in the various homes he owns, and left to brood over the wrongs he believed the West had inflicted on Russia and Russia’s imperial destiny.
Talking to only a few trusted advisors for months at a time, he issued a 5,000-word essay in July 2021, “ On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” explaining why Ukrainians and Russians were one nation.
The essay was both a map of Putin’s state of mind and a warning of what lay ahead.
For at the same time, he began to plot his “special military operation” against Ukraine.
The Biden administration came in determined to establish a “ stable and predictable ” relationship with Russia so that it could focus on what it regarded as more important international challenges, foremost China.
The June 2021 Geneva summit between Putin and President Joe Biden appeared to have stabilized ties and established the guardrails that the U.S. administration sought.
However, a few months thereafter, relations began to deteriorate when U.S. intelligence agencies detected large-scale Russian troop movements on the Russian-Ukrainian border, indicating that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was being planned.
The United States began briefing its European allies in October 2021 about the planned Russian attack, but many of them were skeptical and refused to believe that Russia would embark on a full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors were equally skeptical.
In November 2021, CIA Director Bill Burns traveled to Moscow.
Confronting the Russians with evidence of their planned invasion, he warned Putin in a telephone conversation about the consequences of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He later described Putin as “stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. … He’s created a system in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower. … And it’s a system in which it’s not proven career enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.” After that, contacts between the U.S. and Russian administrations further deteriorated.
One of the last high-level Western engagements with Russia prior to the outbreak of war came in December 2021, when Russia presented the United States and NATO with two draft security treaties.
The United States and its allies decided to take Russia at its word and engage with the Kremlin with a serious response to Russia’s sweeping demands.
These included NATO withdrawing to where it was in May 1997, before Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined, and eschewing any further expansion.
But the Russians were not serious about negotiations and, two months after they ended, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Moscow’s relations with Washington had already fallen to a low ebb.
In contrast, prior to the invasion, Russia’s relations with Europe were more complex and varied.
Relations with Poland and the Baltic states had deteriorated after 2014 but ties with other NATO members—Hungary Italy, Spain, and Greece, for instance—were better.
Relations with the U.K. were increasingly adversarial after the poisonings of former Russian military intelligence double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
But the two major EU players—Germany and France—continued to engage the Kremlin.
Both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Emmanuel Macron went to Moscow prior to the invasion to dissuade Putin from taking military action against Ukraine.
These visits, weeks before the invasion, failed to deter him.
What had changed over the previous several years was Moscow’s relationship with Beijing.
Prior to the Russian invasion, China had already emerged as Moscow’s key partner.
After the Crimean annexation and the imposition of Western sanctions, China and Russia had strengthened their economic and military ties and had agreed that it was imperative to establish a “post-Western” order in which the United States could no longer set the rules.
Putin went to Beijing weeks before the invasion to ensure that China would continue to back Russia, and the two countries signed their “ no limits ” partnership agreement.
Putin may not have informed Xi Jinping that there would be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but he returned from Beijing understanding that he would have Xi’s backing for war with Ukraine.
Russia had also been cultivating ties with Turkey, the BRICS countries, and much of the Global South prior to the invasion.
Although Turkey insisted that Crimea was Ukrainian, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Putin enjoyed a complex relationship with Turkey hedging its bets between NATO and Russia.
Russia had returned to the Middle East in 2015, beginning with its bombing campaign in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad.
In the intervening years, Russia had established itself as a major regional player that was able to talk to all countries and groups in the region—including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, Iran, and Israel.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, therefore, Russia’s ties with the West had deteriorated, but its relationships with China and with much of the Global South remained robust.
Putin calculated that the imperative of eliminating Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state was worth the risk of Western sanctions and that the rest of the world would not respond negatively to Russia’s aggression.
What did Putin hope to accomplish by invading Ukraine?
The immediate goal was to oust Zelenskyy and install a pro-Russian government in Ukraine that would eschew looking West and seeking to join the EU or NATO.
This is what “de-Nazification” meant.
By likening Zelenskyy and his supporters to Nazis, Putin was invoking the cult of World War II which he has created, justifying Russian casualties in Ukraine in terms of the sacrifices Soviet soldiers had made to defeat Hitler’s armies.
As Russia reasserted its domination of Ukraine, it would, so he planned, demilitarize the country.
This would be the first stage in building a Slavic union state, joining Ukraine and Belarus—and possibly Northern Kazakhstan—to Russia.
Putin views himself as the gatherer of Russian lands, in the tradition of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and victory over Ukraine would be the first step in restoring lands that, in his view, rightfully belong to Russia and were severed because of Western machinations in 1991.
But Putin’s aims are broader than that.
Victory over Ukraine would also be the initial step in his quest to abrogate the post-
...
Editor's note:
This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “ The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott.
Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immediate aim was regime change in Kyiv and Ukraine’s subjugation to Russian domination.
But Putin had much broader goals too.
He viewed victory over Ukraine as the first step in undoing the post-Cold-War order which had deprived Russia of its Soviet republics and sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
He sees the Ukraine war as a battle between Russia, NATO, and the “collective West.” Moscow’s victory over Kyiv would, he is convinced, start the process of dismantling an international order that he believes has ignored Russia’s national interests and belittled its position in the world.
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin has yet to achieve these goals.
But Russia has increased its influence in parts of the Global South and has allied itself with three revisionist powers—China, Iran, and North Korea—which share its commitment to a “post-Western” order.
The advent of the second Trump administration—which is committed to upending America’s alliances and robustly engaging in great power politics—has introduced a new element of uncertainty about how Russia might parlay its war with Ukraine into raising its global standing.
From Putin’s point of view, the reestablishment of U.S.-Russian relations under President Donald Trump and the prospect of restoring economic ties are bonuses that were not available before November 2024 and could offer new opportunities for him on the global stage.
Russia’s global position prior to February 24, 2022
Putin’s resentment of the United States has been festering for two decades.
His first public denunciation of the United States and its refusal to recognize what he regards as Russia’s interests and ambitions came in his 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference.
Thereafter—and despite the Obama administration’s attempts to reset relations—ties remained tense.
In the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its launch of a war in the Donbas through Russian separatist proxies in 2014, Russia’s relations with much of the West were on a downward spiral.
Russia was ejected from the G8, and U.S. and European financial and personal sanctions imposed in 2014 have adversely affected the Russian economy.
However, Russia’s counter-sanctions on the European Union (EU) boosted Russia’s own agricultural sector.
Despite deteriorating relations with the West, Germany and other European countries continued to import Russian gas—providing 55% of Germany’s gas consumption.
The Nord Stream II gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea was completed, and Germany was set to increase its dependence on Russian gas.
The Kremlin greeted Trump’s 2016 election with enthusiasm, but despite Trump’s positive comments about Putin, the net result of his first term was disappointing for Russia.
There were waves of sanctions, the U.S. withdrawal from both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties, and no progress was made on strategic stability talks.
Then COVID-19 hit, and Putin became increasingly isolated, sequestered in the various homes he owns, and left to brood over the wrongs he believed the West had inflicted on Russia and Russia’s imperial destiny.
Talking to only a few trusted advisors for months at a time, he issued a 5,000-word essay in July 2021, “ On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” explaining why Ukrainians and Russians were one nation.
The essay was both a map of Putin’s state of mind and a warning of what lay ahead.
For at the same time, he began to plot his “special military operation” against Ukraine.
The Biden administration came in determined to establish a “ stable and predictable ” relationship with Russia so that it could focus on what it regarded as more important international challenges, foremost China.
The June 2021 Geneva summit between Putin and President Joe Biden appeared to have stabilized ties and established the guardrails that the U.S. administration sought.
However, a few months thereafter, relations began to deteriorate when U.S. intelligence agencies detected large-scale Russian troop movements on the Russian-Ukrainian border, indicating that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was being planned.
The United States began briefing its European allies in October 2021 about the planned Russian attack, but many of them were skeptical and refused to believe that Russia would embark on a full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors were equally skeptical.
In November 2021, CIA Director Bill Burns traveled to Moscow.
Confronting the Russians with evidence of their planned invasion, he warned Putin in a telephone conversation about the consequences of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He later described Putin as “stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. … He’s created a system in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower. … And it’s a system in which it’s not proven career enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.” After that, contacts between the U.S. and Russian administrations further deteriorated.
One of the last high-level Western engagements with Russia prior to the outbreak of war came in December 2021, when Russia presented the United States and NATO with two draft security treaties.
The United States and its allies decided to take Russia at its word and engage with the Kremlin with a serious response to Russia’s sweeping demands.
These included NATO withdrawing to where it was in May 1997, before Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined, and eschewing any further expansion.
But the Russians were not serious about negotiations and, two months after they ended, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Moscow’s relations with Washington had already fallen to a low ebb.
In contrast, prior to the invasion, Russia’s relations with Europe were more complex and varied.
Relations with Poland and the Baltic states had deteriorated after 2014 but ties with other NATO members—Hungary Italy, Spain, and Greece, for instance—were better.
Relations with the U.K. were increasingly adversarial after the poisonings of former Russian military intelligence double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
But the two major EU players—Germany and France—continued to engage the Kremlin.
Both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Emmanuel Macron went to Moscow prior to the invasion to dissuade Putin from taking military action against Ukraine.
These visits, weeks before the invasion, failed to deter him.
What had changed over the previous several years was Moscow’s relationship with Beijing.
Prior to the Russian invasion, China had already emerged as Moscow’s key partner.
After the Crimean annexation and the imposition of Western sanctions, China and Russia had strengthened their economic and military ties and had agreed that it was imperative to establish a “post-Western” order in which the United States could no longer set the rules.
Putin went to Beijing weeks before the invasion to ensure that China would continue to back Russia, and the two countries signed their “ no limits ” partnership agreement.
Putin may not have informed Xi Jinping that there would be a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but he returned from Beijing understanding that he would have Xi’s backing for war with Ukraine.
Russia had also been cultivating ties with Turkey, the BRICS countries, and much of the Global South prior to the invasion.
Although Turkey insisted that Crimea was Ukrainian, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Putin enjoyed a complex relationship with Turkey hedging its bets between NATO and Russia.
Russia had returned to the Middle East in 2015, beginning with its bombing campaign in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad.
In the intervening years, Russia had established itself as a major regional player that was able to talk to all countries and groups in the region—including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, Iran, and Israel.
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, therefore, Russia’s ties with the West had deteriorated, but its relationships with China and with much of the Global South remained robust.
Putin calculated that the imperative of eliminating Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state was worth the risk of Western sanctions and that the rest of the world would not respond negatively to Russia’s aggression.
What did Putin hope to accomplish by invading Ukraine?
The immediate goal was to oust Zelenskyy and install a pro-Russian government in Ukraine that would eschew looking West and seeking to join the EU or NATO.
This is what “de-Nazification” meant.
By likening Zelenskyy and his supporters to Nazis, Putin was invoking the cult of World War II which he has created, justifying Russian casualties in Ukraine in terms of the sacrifices Soviet soldiers had made to defeat Hitler’s armies.
As Russia reasserted its domination of Ukraine, it would, so he planned, demilitarize the country.
This would be the first stage in building a Slavic union state, joining Ukraine and Belarus—and possibly Northern Kazakhstan—to Russia.
Putin views himself as the gatherer of Russian lands, in the tradition of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and victory over Ukraine would be the first step in restoring lands that, in his view, rightfully belong to Russia and were severed because of Western machinations in 1991.
But Putin’s aims are broader than that.
Victory over Ukraine would also be the initial step in his quest to abrogate the post-Cold War settlement and restore what he believes should be Russia’s sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space and in Eastern Europe, as the December 2021 draft treaties demonstrated.
This is what he means by renegotiating the Euro-Atlantic security architecture that has been in place for more than 30 years.
He seeks to roll back NATO enlargement because that would facilitate the restoration of a Russian sphere of influence.
Yet his ultimate goal extends further still.
He is determined to achieve what he considers to be Russia’s “rightful” place in the world by joining with China, the BRICS, and other countries to create a “multipolar” order in which the United States is just one of a handful of truly sovereign states and can no longer shape the rules of the international order.
Defeating Kyiv is both the first step and a means to that end.
The increase in Russian disinformation aimed both at the West and the Global South has also been part of Putin’s plan.
Since 2013, Putin has lauded Russia as the upholder of “ traditional family values,” whose population are true Christians, unlike the “ satanic ” people who claim to be Christians in the West.
His assault on the “non-traditional” relationships of “sexual minorities” (i. e., the LGBTQ+ community) and demonization of transgender people is designed to appeal to populist parties in Europe and the United States—and traditional Muslim countries as well.
This has been part of his design to gain more supporters in the West and the Global South before he launched his war.
He understood the Western culture wars early on and has been appealing to those who dislike “woke” ideology and practices.
Indeed, disgruntled Americans and Europeans who support traditional family values can now emigrate to Russia with special visas and live a simple life there tilling the land in carefully chosen villages for foreigners.
The aim of Putin’s disinformation campaign is to garner more support for his policies and his narratives, particularly about the origins of the war against Ukraine, and to undermine Western institutions and policies.
Russia’s global position since February 2022
The Ukraine war has significantly altered the Kremlin’s foreign policy priorities and has led Western countries to seek to isolate Russia.
U.
S-Russian ties greatly deteriorated to the point that high-level contacts were few and far between prior to February 2025.
The Biden administration’s imposition of far-reaching financial and trade sanctions and sanctions against individuals close to Putin did not achieve the economic results Washington hoped for, but they did render Putin and his close associates as pariahs in Western gatherings.
Moreover, regular bilateral discussions on arms control, nuclear weapons, and strategic stability, one of the mainstays of the Moscow-Washington relationship since 1972, when Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT Itreaty regulating strategic nuclear weapons, has also disappeared.
The U.S. side has tried to maintain these channels of communication on nuclear issues, but the Russians have refused to resume discussion of what might replace the New START treaty, which regulates strategic nuclear weapons and expires in 2026, until the United States ceases to support Ukraine.
Putin has declared that Russia is at war with the United States.
As his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said to the Russian newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, “We are in a state of war.
Yes, it started out as a special military operation, but as soon as this group was formed, when the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, it became a war for us.”
Putin has excoriated Washington for its financial and military support for Kyiv.
He has brandished the threat of nuclear weapons in the face of U.S. support for Ukraine and has modified Russia’s nuclear doctrine to reflect this lowering of the threshold needed to initiate a nuclear strike.
The United States is consistently portrayed as Russia’s chief and real enemy in official Russian media, and public opinion data indicate that the majority of Russians inside Russia believe this characterization.
The same is true of Russia’s relations with much of Europe.
The most dramatic reversal came from Germany with Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, which he gave three days after the invasion and promised that Germany would reverse decades of close political and economic engagement with Russia and beef up its own defense sector.
Since the USSR imploded, and in gratitude for Mikhail Gorbachev allowing Germany to unite peacefully, Germany has been committed to engaging post-Soviet Russia and assisting it in its expected triple transition to a market economy, a democratic polity, and a post-imperial nation-state.
Germany emerged as Russia’s number one partner and advocate in Europe and a major source of financial support, intent on integrating Russia into European institutions.
It viewed Russia as its most important partner in the post-Soviet space and regarded Russia’s neighbors—including Ukraine—as subordinate to the imperative of assisting Russia.
Since February 24, 2022, German-Russian relations have declined precipitously, and support for Ukraine became a higher German priority than maintaining ties with Russia.
This is a reversal of decades of traditional Ostpolitik—that is, seeking to maintain and improve ties with Russia, which has been German policy toward Moscow for the past 50 years.
The German government has remained committed to this new policy, and German public opinion largely supports this reversal of Ostpolitik.
However, the Scholz government did not live up to its promise of modernizing its armed forces and spending more on defense.
The February 2025 German federal elections gave the majority of seats in the Bundestag to Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its partners in the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU).
Merz has called for greater support for Ukraine and has been highly critical of Russia.
But the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secured the second-largest number of seats in the Bundestag.
It advocates closer ties to Russia and criticizes support for Ukraine.
After a new coalition government is formed, it will become clearer how long the German reassessment of ties with Russia will last.
If there is a grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the Social Democratic Party, it is likely that support for Ukraine will continue.
So far, Russia’s war with Ukraine has led to a steep deterioration in bilateral ties.
Putin, the German-speaking KGB case officer who used to praise Germany,.
The major Western European countries have also sharply cut back their ties to Moscow as they support Ukraine militarily and financially.
The U.K., France, and Italy have joined U.S. sanctions and have taken in Russians who oppose Putin and the war.
Europe has significantly weaned itself off imported Russian pipeline gas since the war began.
The Baltic states and Poland—front-line countries—have hardened their stances toward Russia, and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have severed their links to Russia’s electricity grid.
Hungary and Slovakia stand out among EU and NATO members because they have refused to cut ties with Moscow and have called for the West to stop supporting Ukraine.
Prime Ministers Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico have both met with Putin in Moscow during the war.
Putin sees that Western resolve to support Ukraine and punish Russia remains strong but is weaker than it was in the first years after the invasion.
He believes that it will continue to fray as the war drags on and Europeans feel the domestic cost of their governments funding the Ukrainian war effort.
While Russia’s ties to the West have diminished, Russia’s relations with China have deepened and grown since the war began.
China remains Russia’s major backer in this war, despite its formal position of neutrality.
Putin would not have launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine without knowing that China would support him.
China has repeated the Russian narrative about NATO’s responsibility for the war and blames the West for the conflict.
More importantly, China has given Russia very substantial economic, military, and technological assistance for its war machine, although it has apparently not supplied lethal weapons.
It is also a top purchaser of Russian hydrocarbons, providing the financial wherewithal for the war to continue.
Putin understands that Xi does not want Russia to lose the war because he fears instability and regime change in Russia could result in a Russian leader coming to power who might rethink the Kremlin’s foreign policy priorities.
Chinese support enables Russia to continue the war as long as it wants to.
Putin sees China as essential for preserving his own regime’s security.
Some now characterize Russia as an economic dependent of China.
Putin has framed defeating Ukraine and undermining its Western supporters as existential issues both for the survival of the Russian state and for his own ability to remain in power.
Without China, he will not be able to accomplish either of these goals.
Russia and China are both promoting alternative multilateral organizations that have no Western members: the expanding BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Russia has managed to increase its influence in the Global South since the invasion of Ukraine and China has largely supported it in these efforts.
China joins Russia in appealing to Global South countries who are wary of the United States and its allies and refuse to choose sides in the Russia-Ukraine war.
China and Russia see the United States as their principal adversary, and they view the war as an opportunity to increase their own leverage internationally.
Since the war began, Russia has joined the trio of China, Iran, and North Korea in what some have termed an “ Axis of Upheaval,” countries seeking to disrupt and end the current international order and diminish American power.
Iran has been an important supplier of drones to Russia and has recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with it.
North Korea has emerged as a key supplier of artillery to Russia.
It has also sent more than 10,000 soldiers to fight in Russia’s Kursk region, part of which is occupied by Ukrainian forces.
The emergence of this group of countries supporting the war against Ukraine has raised concerns about how much they act in concert and how much they threaten Western interests.
So far, this is less an axis than Russia strengthening bilateral relations with all three countries and benefitting from their military support for the war.
But this could be a harbinger of the emergence of a broader anti-Western coalition.
Implications for the West
After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the West sought to isolate Russia.
Indeed, American and European officials reiterated that Putin’s aggression had made him a global pariah.
Yet, three years into the war, and despite his indictment on war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), Putin has maintained an active international schedule.
He hosted leaders from the expanded BRICS and 25 other countries from the Global South in Kazan in 2024 at the BRICS summit.
U.
N.
Secretary-General António Guterres attended the summit, a controversial move that elicited criticism from Western countries.
Putin has also traveled to countries that have not signed the ICC Rome statute and are therefore not obliged to arrest him.
He even held a summit in Mongolia, which has signed the statute but refrained from arresting him.
So, while he has not been able to visit the West, Putin enjoys respect and support in much of the Global South.
These are realities with which the United States and its allies will have to deal going forward.
Russia may have killed, raped, and tortured hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, but not only has it not lost partners in the non-Western world, it has gained influence in some.
Russia’s ability to increase its global footprint despite having violated the U.
N.
Charter and the international rule of law by invading a neighboring state unprovoked is a testimony to its enduring influence and attraction for countries that resent the West and view its criticism of Russia as hypocritical.
Countries in the Global South cite the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan as little different from what Russia has done in Ukraine.
As the war has progressed, Russia has increasingly presented itself as the anti-imperialist leader of the “ world majority,” those who resent what they view as Western arrogance and interference in their domestic affairs.
Many countries are receptive to this narrative even as they recognize that the United States and other Western countries have significantly more to offer them economically than Russia does.
And they believe that the war has provided them with an opportunity to assert themselves more effectively by refusing to take sides during the conflict.
Of course, Russian propaganda and disinformation about the war have penetrated many countries via state-controlled media such as RT, Sputnik, and social media, thereby bolstering suspicions about the West’s role in initiating the conflict.
The Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the subsequent war between Israel and Hamas initially raised Russia’s standing in the Middle East.
Before October 7, 2023, Russia enjoyed close ties with most of the protagonists in all of the Middle East’s conflicts—including Israel.
Israelis would describe Russia as a neighbor because of its presence in Syria and its ability to deter Hezbollah from attacking Israeli targets.
After October 7, Russia changed course by backing Hamas; Putin also distanced himself from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and criticized Israel for its war in Gaza, which he said amounted to the “ total destruction of the civilian population.” Russia has earned praise from Arab countries for its stance.
However, the war with Ukraine has also negatively impacted Russia’s role in the Middle East.
Moscow’s focus on Ukraine meant that it lacked the resources to continue supporting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to the extent that it had prior to 2022.
Assad’s fall was in some measure due to Russia’s diminished role in Syria and represented a major blow to Russia’s role in the Middle East.
Since Assad’s flight to Moscow, the Kremlin has sought to maintain ties with the new regime in Damascus, hoping not to lose its naval and air bases there.
But its future role there is uncertain.
Israel’s degrading of Hezbollah has also diminished Russian influence in the region.
The return of Donald Trump
Despite Russia’s military setbacks during the war, its failure to achieve its original goals in Ukraine, and the tremendous loss of life (it is estimated that at least 800,000 Russians have been killed in action or severely wounded), Putin has believed from the beginning that he could prevail.
He has waited patiently for Ukraine to weaken as war fatigue sets in among Ukrainians suffering from three years of relentless bombing and a lack of electricity and heat.
He has also calculated that the West would become war-weary and more divided over whether to continue supporting Ukraine’s war effort.
Given the high casualty rate, he will only end the fighting if he can present the war termination to his population as a victory for Russia.
He has waited for Trump to return to power, given Trump’s repeated assertions on the campaign trail that the war would not have started had he been president and that he could end it in 24 hours.
As of early 2025, it appears that Putin’s calculations may have been correct.
Ukrainians are increasingly tired of war and favor peace talks, even as they remain very anti-Russian after all that they have suffered.
It is becoming more difficult to recruit young men to the armed forces and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.
Relentless Russian bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has destroyed most of Ukraine’s electricity supply.
Nevertheless, there is a limit to the number of concessions to Russia that Ukrainians are willing to make.
Europe is also divided over continued support for Ukraine, given its own economic challenges and the rise of populist parties that oppose supporting Ukraine and tend to be pro-Russian.
This is particularly true of the far-right German AfD, which came second in the February 2025 federal elections, and the French National Rally.
The major EU governments (with the exceptions of Hungary and Slovakia) and the U.K. still support Ukraine, but their ability to continue military and financial support is limited, and they cannot replace what the United States has provided.
Nevertheless, discussions about reevaluating energy and economic ties with Russia have reemerged since talks about negotiating an end to the war began in 2025.
Some companies—especially in Germany, which has abandoned nuclear power and depends heavily on imported gas—have begun to talk about resuming gas imports from Russia.
Some argue that offering Russia this carrot of revenues from gas exports would be an effective strategy to induce Russia to negotiate an end to the war.
These arguments neglect the historical record of Russia “eating the carrots” it has been offered in a variety of situations without any quid pro quo.
Indeed, the German premise of “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade) assumed that closer economic and energy ties with Russia would moderate its political behavior, a belief that ignores the reality that Russia—and before it the Soviet Union—always seeks to separate economic from political relations.
Trump’s return to power has upended the trans-Atlantic alliance’s unity on Ukraine and Russia and may represent the ultimate success of Putin’s game plan.
The Trump administration has revived U.S.-Russian contacts and reengaged the Kremlin in order to reach a settlement in Ukraine.
Trump announced that he had had a long, productive call with Putin on February 12 and claimed that Putin also wanted to end the war.
On February 18, U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh to talk about reestablishing U.S.-Russian political and economic relations and negotiating an end to the war.
In late March, Trump’s negotiators met with their Ukrainian counterparts in Riyadh, and Ukraine agreed to a one-month total ceasefire.
Trump and his negotiators are now seeking Russia’s agreement to a total ceasefire but so far Russia has refused.
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has met twice with Putin and has repeated the Russian narrative about the war’s origins.
Witkoff says Putin is willing to make a peace deal.
Putin’s isolation from the West is coming to an end.
The normalization of U.S.-Russian ties has so far come with no concessions from Russia and while it continues relentlessly bombing Ukraine.
Moreover, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially said that Ukraine would have to accept the loss of all occupied territories to Russia, eschew NATO membership, and that U.S. troops will not be involved in providing security guarantees or maintaining the peace after the war is over.
However, while negotiations to implement a ceasefire and eventually end the war continue, these terms could change.
Trump has repeated the Kremlin’s claim that the war was caused by Biden’s promise that Ukraine could join NATO and has advocated that Russia rejoin the G7.
He has termed Zelenskyy a “ dictator ” because he did not stand for reelection in 2024 while the country was under martial law and blames him for starting the war.
In an unprecedented public argument with Zelenskyy when he was in the Oval Office, Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of not expressing gratitude for all of the assistance that the United States has provided Ukraine, and Trump told him that Russia holds all the cards in this war while Ukraine holds none.
This reversal of fortune in favor of Russia is stunning.
Putin welcomes the opportunity to meet with Trump.
It will bestow on him the legitimacy as a leader of a great power that he desires.
He may be suspicious of the United States, but he nevertheless craves its validation.
He has ceased to criticize the United States and has praised Trump.
Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, has said, “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations.
This largely coincides with our vision.”
After Zelenskyy’s contentious Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vance, Europe is stepping up to ensure its role in the peace process and to continue backing Ukraine.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted an emergency meeting with European leaders at which he announced that a “ coalition of the willing ” would work with Ukraine and the United States to end the war.
Macron has pledged that a European military contingent made up of NATO members will provide security to Ukraine after the war ends.
Once the war ends, Europe will likely become the main Western backer of Ukraine as U.S. support recedes, providing that Putin does not succeed in blocking a European military presence in Ukraine.
The rupture between Europe and the United States since Trump came into office represents the fulfillment of another of Putin’s goals.
He would like to marginalize Europe and, like his Soviet predecessors, split Europe from the United States and undermine NATO.
Moreover, the prospect of a bilateral U.S.-Russian “deal” over Ukraine holds tantalizing possibilities for a Yalta-type “post-Western” order.
Since Trump’s inauguration and his outreach to Putin, talk of a multipolar world order has subsided and Putin has returned to a theme he has reiterated since his 2015 speech to the U.
N.: “The Yalta system was actually born in travail.
It was won at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars. … Let us be fair.
It helped humanity through turbulent, at times dramatic, events of the last seven decades.
It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.” Putin favors a tripartite Yalta, whereby Russia, the United States, and China divide up the world into spheres of influence.
Is it possible that the United States might be willing at some point to agree with Putin that the world should be divided by the great powers into spheres of influence once again?
It is unclear how China would be included in what would have to be a tripartite division, but with the current world order in disarray, anything is possible.
Every U.S. president since 1992 has tried to reset relations with Russia, believing that, unlike their predecessors, they can find the key to a more constructive relationship with the Kremlin.
Each of these reset attempts has ended in frustration and disappointment largely because the United States and Russia have fundamentally different understandings of the drivers of world policies.
Trump, however, might break this mold, since his understanding of the drivers of global politics is more akin to that of Putin than to that of his predecessors as president.
It would indeed be ironic if, three years after launching this brutal war with the devastating loss of life and property and the destruction of so much of Ukraine’s cultural and religious heritage, Putin emerges triumphant with a war economy in full swing, a largely quiescent population, and a seat at the table with the U.S. president.
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