In Georgia, protesters waving European Union flags have demonstrated against what they see as their pro-Russian leaders. Moldova’s government is pushing to join the bloc, angering citizens who hope for closer relations with Moscow. Armenia has also reached out to Europe, angry that Moscow, a longtime ally, is courting its enemy, Azerbaijan.
Fueled in part by the war in Ukraine, tensions have been rising in some of the former territories of the Soviet Union, pitting those who favor closer relations with Russia against those who are more oriented toward Europe.
Many of those tensions predate the war and have their origins in long-standing internal struggles over power, money and other issues, but they have been amplified by geopolitics, with both Russia and the West pressuring countries to choose a side.
Across the former Soviet Union “the whole context is now determined by how the Ukraine war has radicalized competition between Russia and the West,” said Gerard Toal, author of “Near Abroad,” a study of Russia’s relations with the former Soviet Union. Soviet territories.
Fearful of losing influence, Moscow has issued stark warnings to countries like Georgia and Moldova: remember what happened in Ukraine. Without threatening to invade either country, he has pointed to the tumult and bloodshed that followed Ukraine’s tilt toward the West after a popular revolt in 2014 toppled its pro-Russian president.
Russia also hopes that recent battlefield successes in eastern Ukraine can help reverse the numerous setbacks it suffered to its prestige and influence in a number of former Soviet states at the start of the war.
“Russian information campaigns have been fueling the idea that closer alignment with the West threatens a war that only Russia can win,” said Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s former foreign minister. “Everything depends on Ukraine.”
As the outcome of the war appears increasingly uncertain, “Russia is enjoying the West’s discomfort,” said Thomas de Waal, an expert on the former Soviet Union at Carnegie Europe, a research group.
Russia has a lot of ground to make up and some of its losses may be irreversible.
Distracted by the war and determined to expand relations with Azerbaijan, a rising energy power, Moscow alienated one of its closest allies, Armenia, last year by ordering Russian peacekeepers to stand by when the Azeri troops seized Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed mountainous enclave. Armenia later said it was considering applying to join the European Union and abandon a Moscow-led security pact.
Moldova has stepped up its efforts to join the European Union, which in 2022 granted it candidate status. Last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Moldova to show American support for Ukraine and its potentially at-risk neighbors.
But even in Georgia — which was invaded by Russia in 2008, lost 20 percent of its territory to Moscow-backed separatists, and harbors deep anti-Russian sentiments — a substantial minority still wants to at least improve economic ties with Russia.
“This is not because they like Russia but because they are afraid of it,” said Koba Turmanidze, director of the Caucasus Research Resource Center, a research group in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital.
Mr. de Waal of Carnegie Europe said that while Georgia wanted to stay out of the Ukraine conflict, “it sees the war blowing more in Russia’s direction. She is leaning more towards Russia while trying to remain non-aligned.”
The Georgian government, while officially striving to join the European Union, a goal widely supported by the population, has used fear of Russian retaliation to justify its refusal to join European sanctions against Moscow.
The ruling Georgian Dream party, Turmanidze said, would never say it sides with Russia against Ukraine because “that would be political suicide,” given public hostility toward Moscow. But he has taken steps, notably a controversial foreign influence law that sparked weeks of street protests, which “are Russian-style,” he added.
Maintaining influence over former Soviet lands has been a goal of Moscow since the early 1990s, but it was given new emphasis in a revised “foreign policy concept” signed by President Vladimir V. Putin last year.
The document committed Russia to preventing “color revolutions,” the term used by Moscow for popular uprisings “and other attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia’s allies and partners” and to “prevent and counteract hostile actions by foreign states.” ”.
Casting the recent street protests in Georgia as a repeat of what Moscow believes was a 2014 CIA-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned last week that the demonstrations in Tbilisi were “exactly like what happened in Ukraine.”
And “look how the situation is developing in Moldova,” added ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, referring to tensions there ahead of October’s referendum on European Union membership. In Moldova opinion is divided between those who favor greater integration with Europe and those who look towards Russia.
“This looks like the same scenario that Western masters prepared for Ukraine,” Ms. Zakharova said.
The 2014 street protests in kyiv that toppled Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, were sparked by public outrage over his rejection of a trade and political deal with the European Union that he had promised to sign.
“Russia’s general narrative is that there is a geopolitical conspiracy by the West to subvert the sovereignty of independent states,” Toal said.
The West also has its own history framed in Ukraine, one that Blinken recited last week in Moldova.
“Moldovans are very aware that what happens in Ukraine matters not only to Ukrainians, but also to Moldovans,” Blinken said at a news conference with Moldovan President Maia Sandu. Left unchallenged, she said, Russia “will not stop at Ukraine.”
A few weeks earlier, customs officials at Moldova’s international airport found more than $1 million in cash in the luggage of some Russia-aligned politicians returning from Moscow.
Popescu, who resigned as Moldova’s foreign minister in January and is now a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the money was to finance political activities ahead of the October referendum and a presidential election at the same time.
“You’re allowed to play politics, but you can’t bring bags of cash from Russia,” he said.
He said the danger of direct military intervention by Moscow in Moldova, a serious fear at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has diminished. But recent advances by Russian troops “are worrying,” he added. “They are still very far from us, but it all depends on the outcome of the war.”
War has become the organizing principle around which even the closest internal disputes now revolve, turning internal disputes into high-stakes geopolitical confrontations.
The recent tumult in Georgia over the foreign influence law was in many ways “a local power struggle between different political networks,” Toal said, but the war turned it into a “battle shaped by geopolitics.”
But what protesters see as evidence of their government’s shift away from the West toward Russia is, some analysts say, a sign of narrower concerns ahead of October’s election, such as getting a Swiss bank to unfreeze billions of dollars. belonging to the government of the country. The most powerful oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of the Georgian Dream party.
Ivanishvili has been involved in a long-running dispute with Credit Suisse bank over his money. After winning several court cases and recovering some cash, the Ukraine war added a new hurdle with the freezing of $2.7 billion for 2022 due to concerns about its possible Russian origin.
His party believes Washington forced the money freeze to try to get Georgia to side with the West against Russia.
Whatever the truth, the financial hit made him more determined to confront his perceived internal enemies at any cost, de Waal said.
“He is paranoid and believes this is part of a global conspiracy against him,” he said.