“Russia is facing political isolation in the near abroad, the South Caucasus and Central Asia,” APA quotes NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as saying at the panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The NATO Secretary General said that wars are by nature unpredictable and it is difficult to predict how the war in Ukraine will play out and whether Russia’s losses in Ukraine will lead to changes within Russia: “But we don’t have any indications when any big changes inside Russia but of course there can be surprises.” Stoltenberg said that the loss of up to 300,000 soldiers, the loss of thousands of military equipment and hundreds of planes in this war launched by Russia against Ukraine is something that matters to Russia and ordinary Russian citizens.
“Their economy is struggling. They are paying a high economic price. They are paying a high political price. They’re more politically isolated, also in the near abroad, in Caucasus and Central Asia,” Stoltenberg said.
Indeed, it has been obvious in recent years that the West and Europe are trying to politically isolate Russia in the mentioned regions. The Ukrainian war is also a key element of this. Also, Russia’s efforts to “annihilate” Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Armenia are no secret. But will this plan come to fruition? Will it be possible to remove the ruthless imperialist Russia from the places it historically influenced? What could be the consequences of this?
Shahla Jalilzadeh, a commentator on international relations, said that Stoltenberg’s opinion is essentially an indication of the West’s inability to achieve its goals in Ukraine: “The war in Ukraine has yielded no results for the West, Russia is not experiencing internal division, instead Ukraine is destroyed, it has lost 18% of its land and is devastated. Western countries are not willing to help Ukraine the way they did. The West would like the more than 300,000 lives lost by Russia in this war to morally destroy Russian society, but we are seeing the opposite…”
The political scientist says that certain successes of the West in the Caucasus and Central Asia are not an exception: “Armenia taking the path of integration with the West does not rule out the possibility that in the near future they will face the Georgian scenario of 2008 or, if they go further, the Ukrainian scenario of 2014. If they are ready for this scenario, they can join the queue at the gates of the European Union, just as Georgia has been granted the status of a candidate state today. But this does not seem realistic yet. Because Armenia’s integration into the West requires a rethinking of economic-energy-trade-security relations with Russia, where we see Russia maintaining its weight so far. The war in Ukraine has even strengthened these ties. In 2023, total trade turnover between the two countries reached $6 billion. In the first half of 2023, more than 51% of Armenia’s exports went to Russia. In other words, political reorientation with such economic reliance on Russia means suicide for Armenia and is impossible. Armenia has now started balancing its policy. As for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, I do not believe that the growing economic ties with the West here are anti-Russian in nature. According to a Reuters poll conducted in Kazakhstan last May with 1,100 respondents, 60 percent of respondents were neutral on the Russia-Ukraine war, 12.8 percent supported Russia, and 21.1 percent supported Ukraine. And these results are presented by the West as an indicator that Central Asia is moving away from Russia and closer to the West. Naturally, the “C5 + 1″ as a new regional project serves this very purpose. But one can predict that Kazakhstan will stay in the Eastern bloc (it is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) rather than in the Western bloc in the future and will develop cooperation with China to a greater extent than Russia. The doubling of Kazakhstan’s trade with China, after Western sanctions against Russia relatively weakened the former’s trade relations with Russia, can be considered an indicator of this. It can also be emphasized that at the end of 2023, when Kazakhstan’s trade turnover with Russia was $27 billion, the trade turnover with the EU was larger, $34 billion, which means an increase of 30%, while the trade turnover with China in the first 10 months of last year was $32.7 billion, an increase of 28.5%. Therefore, we can say that the states in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe are further balancing their policies, and the system of China-centric relations in the future world order is beginning to strengthen.”
