The Russian Geopolitical Plan

Wednesday 19 August 2026

It is tempting to imagine that Russia has no geopolitical plan at all. The invasion of Ukraine has been extraordinarily expensive. Moscow has lost men, matériel, markets and much of the political influence it once enjoyed in Europe. Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. Germany has rearmed. Poland has become one of the most formidable military powers on the continent. Ukraine, once a country in which Russian cultural and political influence was pervasive, has become Russia’s implacable enemy. Measured against the optimistic assumptions with which the Kremlin appears to have entered the war in February 2022, this looks remarkably like strategic failure.

Yet this conclusion risks misunderstanding the nature of Russian statecraft. Russia’s geopolitical plan is not a blueprint in the Western bureaucratic sense, with objectives, milestones, budgets and measurable outcomes. It is better understood as a hierarchy of instincts — some ancient, some Soviet and some peculiar to the regime of Vladimir Putin — pursued opportunistically as circumstances permit. The methods change. The immediate objectives may change. But the underlying conception of Russia’s place in the world has proved remarkably durable.

At its centre lies one proposition: Russia must be a Great Power, and a Great Power is entitled to a sphere of influence.

Everything else follows from this.

The geography of insecurity

Russian geopolitical thinking begins with geography. Russia possesses enormous strategic depth but comparatively few natural defensive boundaries across her western approaches. Napoleon came through the European plain. So did Hitler. Before them came Poles, Swedes and others. Russian political culture has therefore developed an enduring obsession with buffers.

The historical solution has been expansion. If Russia’s frontier feels insecure, move the frontier outwards. Once the frontier has moved outwards, the territory beyond the new frontier becomes the next potential source of insecurity. The logic is inherently recursive.

The Russian Empire consequently expanded across Eurasia until it encountered other substantial powers or geographical barriers. The Soviet Union inherited much of this territory and supplemented it after 1945 with an outer glacis of subordinate communist states extending to central Germany. Moscow did not need Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia to become Russian provinces. It needed them not to become strategic platforms for somebody else.

The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore represented something more profound to the Russian security establishment than the disappearance of communism. It represented the disappearance of strategic depth.

Estonia was suddenly independent. Ukraine was independent. Georgia was independent. Soviet forces withdrew from eastern Germany. NATO eventually expanded across much of the former Warsaw Pact and then into the former Soviet Union itself.

From a Western perspective, this was principally a process by which sovereign countries freely chose their alliances. From the Russian geopolitical perspective, sovereignty in the territories surrounding Russia has always been conditional upon the requirements of Russian security.

These two conceptions of European order are fundamentally incompatible.

The empire without an empire

Moscow does not necessarily need formally to annex its neighbours. Indeed formal annexation is often inconvenient. Empire is expensive.

The preferable arrangement is what might be called limited sovereignty. Belarus provides the clearest contemporary example. It remains formally an independent country, with its own government, flag, armed forces and seat at the United Nations. Yet its strategic freedom is sharply constrained by dependence upon Moscow.

This is considerably cheaper than occupation.

The ideal Russian neighbourhood would therefore consist not necessarily of Russian territory but of states that are militarily neutral, economically dependent upon Russia, politically penetrated by Russian interests and incapable of joining institutional structures hostile to Moscow.

The Kremlin’s own 2023 Foreign Policy Concept gives unusually explicit expression to this worldview. It identifies Russia as one of the world’s independent centres of power, demands a multipolar international system and assigns Russia a central security role in what Moscow calls the “near abroad”. It simultaneously describes the United States and its allies as pursuing policies intended to weaken Russia.

Hence Ukraine matters vastly more to Moscow than its economic value alone could possibly explain.

A prosperous, democratic, militarily capable and Western-oriented Ukraine would demonstrate that a large East Slavic country sharing profound historical, linguistic and cultural connections with Russia can nevertheless escape Moscow’s political orbit.

That is dangerous not merely strategically but ideologically.

Ukraine therefore occupies the central position in the Russian geopolitical plan.

Ukraine as the hinge

The Kremlin’s maximal objective in 2022 appears to have been the political destruction of independent Ukraine — probably through the rapid seizure of Kyiv and installation of a compliant government. That failed.

The strategic objective nevertheless survived the failure of the original operational plan.

Russia can still pursue a hierarchy of lesser outcomes. She can seize territory. She can damage Ukrainian infrastructure. It can exhaust Ukraine’s population and economy. She can make reconstruction prohibitively expensive. She can discourage foreign investment. She can attempt to render NATO membership dangerous and European integration burdensome. Above all, she can try to persuade Ukrainians and their allies that the costs of resisting Russia are permanent whereas concessions might purchase peace.

This explains an otherwise curious characteristic of the war: time itself is a Russian weapon.

Moscow does not necessarily have to conquer Kyiv. It needs to survive longer than Western political enthusiasm for supporting Kyiv.

That calculation may prove wrong. Russia has her own demographic, fiscal and military constraints. Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to innovate technologically and strike Russian assets far behind the conventional battlefield. In August 2026 Ukraine has continued deep strikes against Russian military and strategic infrastructure while contesting Russian forces on the ground.

Nevertheless Moscow’s theory of victory remains recognisable: endurance can substitute for decisive military success.

The Russian state can tolerate casualties, repression and reductions in living standards that would create enormous political difficulties for many democratic governments. The Kremlin therefore watches elections in Paris, Berlin, London and Washington almost as closely as developments around the Donbas.

The battlefield extends into Western domestic politics.

Divide Europe from America

The second great component of the Russian geopolitical plan is the fragmentation of the Atlantic alliance.

Moscow understands perfectly well that Russia cannot economically compete with the collective West. The combined economies of NATO countries dwarf Russia’s. The technological resources potentially available to them are greater still.

Russia’s solution is therefore not to defeat the West but to prevent “the West” from acting collectively.

There are several fault lines available for exploitation.

Europe can be divided from the United States. Eastern Europe can be divided from western Europe. Populists can be divided from institutionalists. Governments worried about Russia can be divided from governments worried about migration, debt or China. Europeans can be encouraged to believe that Ukraine is America’s war while Americans can be encouraged to believe that Ukraine is Europe’s problem.

The 2023 Russian Foreign Policy Concept is explicit about Moscow’s desire to diminish American dominance and strengthen alternative institutions including BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. It also portrays Washington as responsible for dividing Russia from Europe.

This last point is particularly important.

Russia’s preferred Europe is not necessarily an enemy Europe. It is an independent and divided Europe.

A Europe detached strategically from the United States, dependent to some degree upon Russian resources and composed of national governments negotiating separately with Moscow would represent an extraordinarily favourable environment for Russian diplomacy.

The European Union is troublesome precisely because it aggregates the bargaining power of countries individually smaller than Russia. NATO is still more troublesome because it adds American military power.

Hence Moscow has every incentive to weaken both institutions without necessarily destroying either.

The politics of intimidation

This strategy requires Russia to cultivate an aura of dangerous unpredictability.

Nuclear threats serve this purpose.

Their principal utility is psychological. Russia does not have to use nuclear weapons for nuclear weapons to influence Western decision-making. She merely has to persuade Western governments that certain actions might generate uncontrollable escalation.

The threat consequently becomes more useful than the weapon.

The same principle applies to sabotage, cyber operations, political influence campaigns and covert action. These methods inhabit the territory between peace and conventional war. They create costs while making retaliation complicated.

European governments increasingly describe this as hybrid warfare. On 18 August 2026 a German court convicted a man in connection with a Russian intelligence-linked operation involving parcels used to explore possible sabotage methods, amid wider European concern about covert Russian activities.

Russia simultaneously uses rhetoric to suggest that Western support for Ukraine risks converting supporting countries into belligerents. Moscow’s latest warnings towards Britain over military assistance to Ukraine illustrate precisely this technique.

The intended audience is rarely just the government being threatened. It is its electorate.

The message is simple: Ukraine is not worth the risk.

The Global South and the multipolar world

The third component of Russian strategy extends far beyond Europe.

Moscow has recognised that the post-Cold War international order is weakening for reasons that have little to do with Russia. China’s rise, India’s emergence, the economic development of Southeast Asia, resentment of Western sanctions and interventions and the increasing assertiveness of middle powers have all produced a less Western-centric world.

Russia seeks to surf this historical wave.

Her preferred vocabulary is multipolarity.

The word sounds innocuous. Indeed multipolarity is in some respects simply a description of reality. American predominance is plainly less overwhelming than it was during the 1990s.

But Russian multipolarity contains a normative proposition. Great Powers should possess exceptional prerogatives within their regions.

China should be accommodated as a dominant Asian power. Russia should enjoy privileged interests throughout the former Soviet space. The United States should cease attempting to impose universal political standards upon other states.

Smaller countries become uncomfortable objects in this conception because their sovereignty collides with Great Power geography.

Ukraine insists that she possesses exactly the same legal sovereignty as Russia. Moscow’s geopolitical philosophy effectively replies that geography says otherwise.

This is the nineteenth century attempting to negotiate with the twenty-first.

China: partner, patron or eventual problem?

The Russian relationship with China contains the greatest contradiction in the entire strategy.

Russia wants a multipolar world because she wishes to escape American predominance. Yet weakening the American-led system increases Russian dependence upon China.

That may merely exchange one hierarchy for another.

China has roughly ten times Russia’s population and an economy many times larger. Siberia contains immense natural resources beside a comparatively densely populated Chinese economic zone. Russian hydrocarbon exports increasingly depend upon Asian customers. Chinese manufactured goods and financial channels have acquired greater importance as Western economic relationships have deteriorated.

Moscow therefore describes Beijing as a strategic partner — and genuinely benefits from that partnership — while quietly confronting an uncomfortable long-term question.

In a genuinely multipolar Eurasia, which pole will be larger?

The answer is obviously China.

Russia’s geopolitical project may therefore contain the seeds of its own diminution. In attempting to escape a Western-dominated order, Moscow risks becoming the heavily armed junior partner of Beijing.

An axis of the dissatisfied

Russia accordingly seeks relationships with states that have their own reasons for challenging Western power.

Iran, North Korea and other governments can provide weapons, markets, diplomatic support or mechanisms for circumventing sanctions. These relationships need not rest upon ideological similarity. They rest upon overlapping interests.

The development is increasingly explicit. On 18 August 2026 Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described Russian-North Korean cooperation as part of a struggle for a new world order, after North Korean forces had already provided substantial military assistance to Russia.

This does not amount to a coherent anti-Western NATO. The interests of Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Delhi and other capitals diverge enormously.

That does not matter.

Russia does not require an alliance. She requires sufficient networks of cooperation to make Western attempts at isolation ineffective.

The southern route

There is another dimension that receives less attention: access southwards.

The Russian Empire and Soviet Union repeatedly sought political influence towards the Black Sea, Caucasus, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and ultimately the Middle East.

The reasons remain geographical.

Russia’s northern ports face difficult geography. The Baltic can be constrained by NATO. The Black Sea provides access towards the Mediterranean but depends upon the Turkish Straits. The Caucasus connects Russia with Iran and the Middle East. Central Asia leads towards China, Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent.

Hence Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian republics matter disproportionately to Moscow.

The struggle for Ukraine is therefore part of a larger contest over the architecture of Eurasia.

If Russia dominates Ukraine and Belarus, retains leverage in Moldova and the Caucasus and maintains predominance across Central Asia, then it remains the organising power across much of northern Eurasia.

If those countries steadily integrate into alternative European, Turkish, Chinese or Western structures, Russia becomes something different: a very large country rather than an empire.

For the Kremlin elite, that distinction is existential.

Why Russia can lose battles and still pursue the plan

This explains one of the most confusing aspects of Russian behaviour.

Western analysis often asks whether Russia is “winning” or “losing”. Moscow’s strategic horizon is less binary.

A failed offensive can be followed by another offensive. A lost client government can be replaced by political interference. Economic sanctions can be answered by alternative trading networks. Conventional weakness can be compensated for with nuclear intimidation. Military stalemate can be transformed into diplomatic bargaining.

The Russian state has historically been unusually willing to absorb reverses while waiting for circumstances to change.

This does not make Russia omnipotent. Quite the contrary. Russian history contains spectacular strategic catastrophes.

But it makes Russian policy persistent.

The Kremlin does not need every move to succeed because the game does not end.

The ultimate objective

What, then, would victory look like?

Probably not Russian tanks rolling to Lisbon. Russia lacks both the capacity and any rational reason to attempt the conquest of Europe.

A successful Russian geopolitical settlement would be subtler.

Ukraine would be territorially diminished, militarily constrained and excluded from NATO. Belarus would remain firmly within Moscow’s strategic system. Moldova and Georgia would abandon aspirations to Western military integration. NATO would formally survive but American commitment to European defence would become uncertain. European states would increasingly pursue bilateral accommodations with Moscow. Sanctions would gradually erode. Russian energy and commodities would return more extensively to European markets.

Meanwhile Russia would retain close relations with China while cultivating India, the Gulf states, Africa, Latin America and other powers unwilling to participate consistently in Western containment.

The United States would remain powerful but would cease to be the unquestioned organiser of international security.

Russia would then stand as one of perhaps half a dozen indispensable centres of global power.

That is approximately the world described in Russia’s own foreign policy doctrine.

The weakness in the plan

There is nevertheless an enormous flaw.

Russia’s strategy assumes that coercion generates obedience.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes it generates coalitions.

The invasion of Ukraine produced precisely the strategic developments Russia claimed she wished to prevent. NATO expanded. European defence expenditure increased. Ukraine developed an intensely consolidated national identity. Russia’s Baltic neighbours became still more hostile. Poland accelerated its rearmament.

The deeper problem is that spheres of influence work most efficiently when neighbouring countries prefer belonging to them.

The United States built an extraordinarily durable European sphere of influence after 1945 partly because Western European countries wanted American protection. Soviet domination of eastern Europe required tanks, secret police and political coercion.

Russia faces the same difficulty today.

Belarus can be held close. Ukraine has proved dramatically harder. Georgia remains contested. Moldova continues to resist Russian pressure. Central Asian governments increasingly diversify their relationships with China, Turkey, Europe and others.

Russia possesses immense capacity to obstruct the geopolitical choices of her neighbours. She possesses considerably less capacity to make those neighbours love Russia.

That distinction may ultimately determine the success or failure of the entire project.

The long contest

The Russian geopolitical plan should therefore neither be dismissed as madness nor inflated into omnipotent conspiracy.

It is rational within its own assumptions.

Those assumptions are that international politics is fundamentally competitive; that Great Powers naturally dominate weaker neighbours; that military force remains an ordinary instrument of statecraft; that Western unity is temporary; that democratic societies have limited tolerance for prolonged sacrifice and that Russia’s exceptional capacity for endurance will eventually allow it to outlast its opponents.

Some of those assumptions are demonstrably questionable.

Others are uncomfortable precisely because they contain elements of truth.

The struggle taking place in Ukraine is consequently about considerably more than Ukrainian territory. It is a contest between two ideas of international order.

One says that borders, alliances and political systems are ultimately choices for sovereign states themselves.

The other says that sovereignty has always been constrained by geography, power and the interests of empires — and always will be.

Russia’s geopolitical plan is to prove that the second proposition remains true.

Ukraine’s struggle is to prove that it does not.