Putin’s bet could pay off

A week earlier, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, He ordered his tanks into Ukraine, causing Western nations to cut ties with Russia and throw their support behind kyiv.

The shock over Putin’s brazen land grab reverberated across the planet.

Many expected Russia to become a black beast.

But soon Russia’s adversaries realized that the country was not going anywhere.

Forced to prepare for a long war, the Kremlin ordered its diplomats, intellectuals and agents to secure support in the non-Western world.

Many countries were receptive to Russian overtures, and refused to be forced into a binary decision between Russia and the West.

Russia soon became a unique case:

the most sanctioned country in the world, but fully capable of staying afloat.

The distancing from Europe was offset by increasingly closer relations with the global south.

To try to understand this turn of events, I undertook a trip around the world.

Traveling to more than a dozen countries, I spoke to politicians and people who support Russia, and interviewed Russians pushing the Kremlin’s agenda from Moscow and those operating on the periphery.

The question was simple:

How has Russia managed to manage the rejection it receives from the West?

What I discovered was a testament to the country’s relentless adaptation.

No matter what the West does, Russia will not give in.

In Dubai, the successes of Russia’s economic maneuvers were unmistakable.

After the invasion, the United Arab Emirates became the epicenter of Russian strategy in wartime:

a haven for Russia’s wealthy relocating their businesses, a conduit for Russian merchants importing Chinese goods, and a hub for Russian banks settling payments in currencies other than the dollar.

For Russia’s shadow tankers, transporting Russian oil to willing buyers across Asia, the UAE became a place to shapeshift and camouflage.

In the underworld of shell companies and complacent professionals, Russia managed to evade sanctions Westerners.

Other Russian plots were more sinister.

In the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, about 965 kilometers east of Moscow, there is a center for the assembly of drones of Iranian origin used to bomb Ukraine.

Central to this effort is a pseudo-vocational program that has targeted young African women to work there, with administrators making false promises of career development and a life filled with love and marriage.

Spread across social media platforms, the recruiting spree represented just a small fragment of Moscow’s information campaigns in Africa, which scored points by presenting Russia as an antidote to the West.neocolonial”.

In Vienna and New York, I witnessed the highest forms of Russian power plays.

At the United Nations, Russian diplomats worked to corral non-Western countries into supporting their positions, including those on the war in Ukraine.

Russian diplomats also used newer formats to court friends.

Chairing the Brics alliance in 2024, the Kremlin impressed its partners with hundreds of events, including a fashion show, a sports tournament and a major summit in the city of Kazan.

like a formidable host, Russia made it clear that it would not be isolated.

In South Africa, there was little need for persuasion.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the African National Congress, or ANC—the country’s dominant political force, which led the fight against apartheid—blamed Western nations for the war.

Meeting with ANC veterans, I saw how gratitude for Soviet support during the fight against apartheid was combined with antipathy toward a West that, to them, seemed so much hypocritical as hyperdominant.

The result was an instinctively pro-Russian stance that tended to dismiss Ukraine’s distinctive identity and agency.

I also met individuals whose affinity for Russia was more idiosyncratic.

Journalist Paula Slier grew up in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg in the 1980s, immune to the kind of pro-Russian sentiment cultivated by the ANC underground.

After joining on a whim Russia Todaya state-funded news channel, in 2005, she slowly internalized its news culture.

Even as the channel’s propaganda became more strident over the years, Slier continued to see his work as necessary and correct.

In the global information war, he told me, Russia was the “underdog.”

Others have aligned themselves with Russia more out of self-interest than affection.

In Georgia, the ruling party, Georgian Dream, followed Russia’s lead in repressing civil society.

Ahead of parliamentary elections in October 2024, Georgian Dream warned that the “global war party” – its political opponents and Western supporters – sought to drag Georgia into a conflict with Russia, just as had happened in Ukraine.

The goal of Georgian Dream was simple:

strengthen the control of the party in power.

In the process, he furthered Putin’s agenda of discrediting Western-style democracy and strengthening fellow travelers in the region.

If Russia could count on both converted and circumstantial accomplices, its war against Ukraine also generated new, and even unlikely, opponents.

The young urban Kazakhs I interacted with in Almaty were worried that their country, which shares the world’s second-longest border with Russia, could become the next victim of Putin’s aggression.

These Kazakhs led Russia’s “decolonization” efforts, advocating for the use of the Kazakh language over Russian in everyday life, along with a reckoning with the horrific dimensions of Russian and Soviet imperial policies in their country.

In Armenialocals felt abandoned by Russia, rather than fearful of its meddling.

In September 2023, with the Kremlin concerned about Ukraine, Russian peacekeepers stood by as Azerbaijan took control of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azat Adamyan, a pub owner I met in Yerevan, was among the tens of thousands displaced from the enclave.

Putin’s portrait no longer hangs in his pub, which was reopened in the Armenian capital.

Other Karabakh Armenians blamed the Armenian government — which has since moved to diversify its foreign partners — for their plight.

Either way, Russia’s prestige took a hit.

Armenia’s story hints at a broader phenomenon, which the Kremlin’s success in securing support has failed to obscure:

Russia’s global power is steadily eroding.

I felt this most strongly during my trips to the Middle East in early 2025.

In Majdal Shams, a border town in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, I sat with local Druze celebrating the recent overthrow of Bashar al-Asad in neighboring Syria, a major defeat for the Kremlin, which supported the al-Assad dynasty for decades until it was unable to protect its client.

Trump’s return to the White House has generally worsened Russia’s plight.

His campaign promises of an anti-interventionist foreign policy have given way to US military operations against Iran and Venezuelaboth partners of Russia.

Having boasted that he could resolve the Ukraine war “within 24 hours” — and suggested he could do so by bowing to Russian demands — Trump has since grown tired of the conflict, distracted by the aftershocks of his military gamble in the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a new bilateral relationship remains unfulfilled.

Without Trump’s intercession, Russia must continue fighting in Ukraine.

The cost is increasing: an estimate of 1.4 million Russian casualties on the battlefield, Ukrainian drones that now reach deep into Russia and a faltering economy.

However, having subjected the entire country to the needs of his calamitous war, Putin understands that its outcome will determine Russia’s global reputation.

“Our friends, neighbors and our adversaries and enemies are following very closely how it develops,” his Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, recently recalled before an elite meeting in Moscow.

Despite all the danger of war, Putin has opted to hold out longer than the West.

In a world that is home to a seemingly inexhaustible well of admirers and followers, along with countless accomplices and enablers, their gamble may yet pay off.