Kyrgyzstan's President Sadyr Japarov, left, Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajikistan's President Emomali Rahmon and Turkmenistan's President Serdar Berdymukhamedov attend the Summit of leaders from the Commonwealth of Independent States in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Oct. 14, 2022.Valery Sharifulin/The Associated Press
Anna Arutunyan is a Russian-American writer and a global fellow at the Wilson Center. She is the author of The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult and, more recently, Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers, and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin used to be notorious for being hours late to his meetings with world leaders – a power play that was not lost on politicians such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But now, with no end in sight to his disastrous war in Ukraine, it is the Russian President who is being kept waiting at international summits – by Mr. Erdogan, by the Emir of Qatar, and by even his closest allies.
During a September meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, or SCO, Mr. Putin was shown standing alone, studying his notes, as he waited for the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Azerbaijan to show up. And in June, Kazakhstan’s President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, defied Moscow by declining to recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Ukraine’s breakaway pro-Russian statelets of Donetsk and Lugansk, which Russia has since illegally annexed.
Even Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon, the President of one of Central Asia’s poorest former Soviet states, and one that has long relied economically on Russia, has given Mr. Putin an unprecedented dressing-down. “We have always respected the interests of our main strategic partner, Russia,” he said at the Russia-Central Asia summit held in Astana on Oct. 14. “We want respect, too. We want to be treated on the same level as any other country.”
This unusual and highly public criticism from a traditional ally was telling, given the region’s authoritarian, personalist political culture where such signals and optics are deeply important. And it sent a powerful message, one that was perhaps even more powerful than Mr. Putin’s tardiness tactics: that the Russian President has lost influence in the former Soviet Union.
Mr. Putin’s increasing obsession with Ukraine over the years has hobbled his traditional role as the primary regional broker and constable for the former Soviet states. But this fall, in particular, has demonstrated his paralysis in an area that has traditionally formed an important bulwark of his domestic power and credibility. Indeed, when hostilities broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia in September, it was Washington, not Moscow, that rushed in to mediate a truce and protect Russia’s traditional ally, Armenia.
Moscow has relied on its eastward pivot – a policy to reorient Russia’s economy toward trade with Asian countries – to help it endure the barrage of crippling economic sanctions introduced by Western countries after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. But the move was also meant to demonstrate that it still had alliances that would remain unaffected by Western attempts to isolate Russia, such as the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, a military alliance of former Soviet states that includes Armenia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, among others. But that illusion is fraying.
The Tajikistani President’s comments – “not enough attention was paid to the small republics” – punctured a myth that Mr. Putin has been trying hard to sell to hawkish patriots back home: that Russia was repairing the fractured former USSR and restoring the country’s influence among its former members. Mr. Rahmon’s remarks were a thinly veiled attack on Russia’s handling of post-USSR conflicts, particularly the one in eastern Ukraine, which has exploded into a full-fledged war.
Mr. Rahmon’s criticism was certainly part of an attempt to extract more financing and concessions from Russia. Tajikistan relies heavily on Russian trade and the money that the more than a million Tajikistani migrants working in Russia send back home. And practically speaking, Mr. Rahmon’s allegiance to Mr. Putin does not in and of itself translate into more money, soldiers or weapons to wage his war in Ukraine. While Russia has relied on CSTO countries to circumvent Western sanctions, Mr. Rahmon’s criticism does not pose implications for its place in the alliance.
Still, the perception that Mr. Putin’s power is waning is what emboldened Mr. Rahmon to press the Russian President this way, and it makes Mr. Putin even more vulnerable to such pressure from Russia’s domestic regional vassals, such as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and from Mr. Putin’s more powerful regional allies, including Mr. Tokayev in Kazakhstan. It will also affect the political calculi in Ankara, New Delhi and Beijing in how these powers manoeuvre their relationship with Mr. Putin – and especially in their estimate of what they can get from Russia.
In other words, the President of a small Central Asian country has just demonstrated to Mr. Putin that the Russian leader’s reliance on its non-Western allies comes at a price that Russia’s increasingly crippled economy is hard-pressed to pay. And others have surely noticed.