The Limits of Russian Power

On the eve of invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia enjoyed a decent global position. It had a strong partnership with China; extensive economic ties with Europe; a working relationship, however fraught, with the United States; and an informal network of partners with which to do business. Russia dominated few countries (other than Belarus) but also had few real enemies and could exercise influence beyond its neighborhood. More than a rising or declining power, Russia was a protean power.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine. In response, Europe and the United States immediately became Moscow’s adversaries. The Kremlin, having lost much of its diplomatic influence in Europe, became much more reliant on China. The war, meanwhile, has absorbed Russia’s attention and virtually all of its military capacity, making it hard for Moscow to steer events farther afield. As a result, the Kremlin could do little as some of its allies, including Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, fell. The war itself has not gone particularly well, either. After four years of fighting, Ukraine remains in control of roughly 80 percent of its territory.

But Moscow is hardly prepared to cut its losses. Unless U.S. President Donald Trump can persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the fighting—an unlikely scenario—Russia will probably try harder to subjugate Ukraine, not because the battlefield decisively favors Moscow but because Putin needs to hold the line somewhere. He is poised to respond to Russia’s geopolitical limits by recommitting to its war. The humanitarian catastrophe he has already inflicted on Ukraine, depriving it of heating and electricity amid freezing conditions, may soon get even worse.

ON THE SIDELINES

Putin has long overestimated what Russian hard power alone can achieve. This problem first manifested itself in Ukraine in 2014. Having incited a revolution, Viktor Yanukovych—Ukraine’s president from 2010 to 2013 and a Kremlin ally—fled the country. Putin could have responded to Yanukovych’s ouster by cooperating with Yanukovych’s successors. Instead, he opted for military force, invading Crimea in Ukraine’s south and the Donbas in its east. Russia seized the former and established two breakaway regions in the latter, but in the process it inadvertently undermined organic pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. After 2014, Kyiv strengthened ties with Washington and Europe, which is exactly what Putin was hoping to prevent. In 2022, the limits of Russian hard power became even more evident. Although large military forces invaded Ukraine from several directions, they could not take its three largest cities, including the capital, and were soon pushed back along multiple axes. The Kremlin, which had banked on a quick and total victory, was stuck in a long slog.

Ukraine’s successful resistance forced Russia to adapt its foreign policy. To evade export controls, Moscow procured restricted goods through intermediaries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. It started selling much more oil to India, often at steep discounts. To sidestep U.S. and European energy sanctions, Russia cobbled together a “shadow fleet”—a mass of aging tankers that typically carry bogus insurance and use opaque business structures to hide their true owners. China became Russia’s primary source of industrial goods and the biggest buyer of its fossil fuels. For Moscow, the decision to forge deeper relations with China was practical as well as strategic. The Kremlin hoped to lead the so-called global South with Beijing and to accelerate the decline of the West. Whereas China can use its massive economic clout to win favor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Russia can capitalize on its skills in subversion and on the former Soviet Union’s positive reputation in parts of the postcolonial world.

After years of hedging in the Middle East between Iran and Israel, Russia began favoring Iran and its anti-Western partners in 2022. It tightened defense cooperation with the Islamic Republic over Israel’s protestations. On several occasions in 2024, Putin rolled out the red carpet in Moscow for representatives of Hamas and the Houthis. Russia’s relationship with Israel did not fully unravel—the two sides continued to coordinate their military activities to avoid clashes in Syria, for instance—but it frayed considerably.

These shifts masked a more negative and enduring reality for the Kremlin. Russia had lost much of its capacity to protect its partners and its interests beyond Ukraine. In 2023, Russian peacekeepers stood by as Azerbaijan seized the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia, Russia’s traditional ally. As Israel fought and weakened the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and even Iran itself, Russia watched from the sidelines. Russia was once again a bystander when, in December 2024, local rebels swept away the Assad regime in Syria, a dynasty Moscow had been fighting for years to preserve.

TRUMP BUMP OR SLUMP?

In 2024, the Kremlin celebrated Trump’s reelection. At the start of Trump’s second term, many observers predicted that his disdain for international law, apparent embrace of spheres of influence, and affinity for what Russia calls traditional values (such as an aversion to LGBT rights) would advantage Moscow. That has not been the case. Now that the United States has embraced revisionism, Russia’s inability to project power beyond Ukraine has become more obvious. In the summer of 2025, the United States joined Israel in the air campaign that damaged Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure. In January, Trump extracted Maduro in a sleek, overnight military operation that Putin could only dream of. For all his complaints about Kyiv, the U.S. president has yet to abandon Ukraine, although he has been less generous with assistance than was President Joe Biden.

Trump has also repeatedly taken the initiative in Russia’s backyard. He has showered Central Asian leaders with attention and deemed himself the mediator in chief between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In January, the United States and Armenia announced an implementation framework for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a trade corridor in the South Caucasus. Trump has also invited Russia to join his Board of Peace, a new conflict-settlement body, without granting Russia special status. Trump expects Putin to defer to his leadership role.

Putin is not in the mood to make concessions.

Russia is hardly out of the picture regionally or globally. Moscow retains influence in the Middle East and has increased its clout in western Africa by deploying its Africa Corps, a paramilitary group, on behalf of Sahelian juntas. Russia does not rely on Iranian or Venezuelan support to prosecute its war against Ukraine. China and North Korea remain committed partners, and Russian state media has been celebrating Trump’s degradation of the transatlantic alliance, most recently with his threats to take Greenland.

But Moscow has yet to gain any advantages from the tensions between Washington and European capitals. Europe is increasing its own support for Ukraine, and NATO remains a functioning institution with which Russia must reckon. Putin cannot assume that Trump’s foreign policy adventurism will be confined to the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East. It could easily and suddenly make itself felt on Russia’s doorstep. The year 2025 was a bad one for Russia, and 2026 may be even worse. Moscow’s global position is ebbing because of Trump.

PUTIN’S WHITE WHALE

As Russia struggles to assert itself globally, Putin has become even more obsessed with Ukraine. The situation on the battlefield is sustainable for Moscow. Russia’s frontlines are holding, and its forces are making gradual territorial progress, but Moscow is far from winning. Despite the flurry of Ukraine-related diplomacy, peace talks have gone nowhere. Trump’s position on the war continues to oscillate. Meanwhile, Europe is discovering its agency and will not tolerate a peace plan tantamount to a Ukrainian surrender. Assisted by Europe, Kyiv will refuse to yield preemptively to Russia.

However miserable the conflict is for Russia, Putin is not in the mood to make concessions. He has reoriented the economy and structured global relationships to fight this war, which has already lasted longer than the Soviet campaign against Nazi Germany. Aware that the war’s outcome will be the ultimate referendum on his presidency, he may even consider escalating, including beyond Ukraine’s borders. In January, following claims that European countries had made progress on agreeing to security guarantees for Kyiv, Russia fired a type of ballistic missile at Ukraine that is nuclear-capable and has a range that violates the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the United States quit in 2019. The missile landed 40 miles away from the Polish border.

The war may well be entering a more dangerous phase. Inspired, perhaps, by Trump’s seizure of tankers linked to Russia in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, European countries are doing more to harass Russia’s shadow fleet, which is already under attack from Ukrainian drones. Russia might escalate by striking Ukraine’s supply routes in eastern Europe or by attacking the U.S.-owned satellites that provide targeting information to Kyiv. Putin may push harder to make Ukraine uninhabitable—to impose financial burdens on its supporters and to threaten further refugee flows into Europe—even if he can’t win.

Though Europe and the United States would be wise to reestablish a coordinated process for handling the war, transatlantic friction will likely hinder such efforts. Europe should therefore step up its support for Kyiv, while readying itself for Russian escalation in and around Ukraine. Most important, U.S. and European leaders should not rush any talks to end the conflict. They must keep in mind the power their countries hold. Russia is neither invincible nor surging ahead. It is merely one of many countries disadvantaged by the anarchic world order Trump has unleashed in his second term.

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