Moscow’s Former Colonies Are Done Taking Orders From Putin | Opinion
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. For three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, governments across Central Asia and the South Caucasus made foreign-policy decisions with one question always in mind: What will Moscow allow?
Kazakhstan supplies rare earths to America and tells Vladimir Putin to end his war. Armenia has written EU membership into law and stopped showing up to Russia's military alliance. Azerbaijan hosts conferences on Russian colonialism and helps build Ukraine's railways. Moscow has found no way to make them start asking again.
The war in Ukraine, which has consumed the military and economic resources Russia used to police its periphery, is only part of the explanation. The deeper problem is how Russia managed these relationships in the first place. Putin relied on coercion: frozen conflicts on their territory, trade embargoes when they strayed, and the standing implication that Russian troops could arrive if matters went far enough. Russia's economic presence was real but built to bind rather than to build—stakes in export pipelines, control of transit routes and power grids, leverage over the migrant labor on which several economies depend. Russia never became a source of technology, capital or security that made these countries stronger. Influence of that kind requires the capacity to frighten. Ukraine drained the capacity, and little else was holding them.
Kazakhstan illustrates how far things have moved.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Putin, with RT's editor-in-chief present, that Kazakhstan will never recognize Russia's separatist projects, naming Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Luhansk and Donetsk one by one.
In July, standing beside Putin at a summit in Omsk, he said the war "has to be stopped." Meanwhile, Kazakhstan and the United States have built exactly the partnership Moscow spent decades blocking: the first country of President Trump's second term to join the Abraham Accords , $7 billion in Boeing orders, billions more in technology partnerships, and a growing role supplying the critical minerals that Washington needs to escape Chinese processing monopolies.
Armenia is more striking still. The Kremlin ran a full-scale campaign to unseat Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the June elections. Documents leaked to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project exposed a Russian program to triple the reach of anti-Pashinyan narratives and expand a network of paid pro-Russian voices, while The Insider traced ties between Russian intelligence and the opposition's businessman backers. In an April meeting at the Kremlin, Putin pressed Pashinyan to choose between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. Pashinyan declined the ultimatum and offered a pointed joke instead: some Armenian citizens complain there is "too much democracy" in Armenia—after all, its social networks are "100 percent free." Pashinyan won the election comfortably.
Russia's deepest regional asset was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict itself. As long as the two were at war, both needed Moscow, which is why the Kremlin worked to manage the conflict rather than end it. The U.S. simply took the file away, brokering the peace agreement and the planned Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity through Armenia's south. The remaining piece is a new Armenian constitution, required to conclude a comprehensive treaty and now headed toward a referendum. Its significance is durability: a constitutional settlement, unlike a signature, cannot be reversed if pro-Russian revanchists win an election.
Azerbaijan has led this shift. After Russian air defenses downed an Azerbaijani passenger jet in 2024, President Ilham Aliyev demanded a public admission of guilt rather than accepting Moscow's nonapology. He has sent Ukraine humanitarian aid, most recently 40 tons of railway equipment, and urged Kyiv, “never to accept occupation" of its territories.
"A nation that aspires to be independent and preserve its identity cannot be enslaved or coerced," he said last month. "Those who support the continuation of this war should understand that." In July, Baku hosted Circassian, Sakha and Buryat organizations for a conference on Russian colonial policy, which called on Moscow to stop sending ethnic minorities to die in Ukraine. Days later, at a media forum in Shusha, Aliyev joked that Russia had fired one journalist and labeled another a "foreign agent" for saying something positive about Azerbaijan, and advised a Russian analyst in the audience to be careful. Moscow's response? The Kremlin called his Ukraine stance "mistaken" but pledged good relations, and within days, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that ties had "fully normalized" and "the previous difficulties are behind us."
Related Story Armenia’s Election is America’s Fight | Opinion The region's governments are also dismantling Russia's influence apparatus on the ground.
Uzbekistan has held pro-Russian blogger Aziz Hakimov for nine months; Kyrgyzstan kept political operative Viktor Vasilyev in a Bishkek remand center for over a year before expelling him; Kazakhstan jailed blogger Aslan Tolegenov. At a round table in Moscow last month, pro-Kremlin commentators could do little but demand that Russia's Foreign Ministry defend its "supporters abroad" and warn of a new "anti-Russia" forming in the region.
Freed from Moscow's veto, these states are building things together. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have ratified a green-energy corridor anchored by a planned high-voltage cable under the Caspian, with feasibility work backed by the Asian Development Bank. Increased Kazakh crude flows to world markets through Azerbaijan's Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, bypassing Russia. Last October, Azerbaijani troops joined Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik forces in Birlik-2025, among the largest…
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