EuropeAnalysis

Russia regains influence in its ‘near abroad’ as West wraps itself in red lines

Embattled Ukraine warns that Georgia and Moldova are being pulled back towards Moscow

An campaigner in Chisinau, Moldova, where the second round of the presidential election, between incumbent Moldovan President Maia Sandu and former prosecutor general Alexandr Stoianoglo, will take place on Sunday. Photograph: Dumitru Doru/EPA
An campaigner in Chisinau, Moldova, where the second round of the presidential election, between incumbent Moldovan President Maia Sandu and former prosecutor general Alexandr Stoianoglo, will take place on Sunday. Photograph: Dumitru Doru/EPA
Thu Oct 31 2024 - 16:28

Ukraine is now losing ground on the eastern battlefield at a worrying rate, but its president had a warning for the West this week: that it is also letting the Kremlin win battles for influence around the region, putting the strategic direction of Georgia and Moldova in doubt.

It has been a pleasing autumn for Russia in Ukraine’s devastated Donbas region and in international affairs, even before a US election that could return Donald Trump to the White House and throw Washington’s foreign policy priorities and allegiances into question.

Moldova’s strongly pro-western president Maia Sandu faces a tight election run-off on Sunday against a rival who wants to ease tension with Moscow, and the “yes” vote on enshrining EU membership in the country’s constitution won a referendum by such a tiny margin this month that the nation’s pro-Russian camp claimed it as their victory.

In Georgia the opposition alleges that last Saturday’s parliamentary election was rigged by a ruling party that refuses to join international sanctions on Moscow, says the West is trying to drag it into war with the Kremlin, and refuses to revoke laws that critics say mimic repressive legislation enacted by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

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President Salome Zourabichvili denounced the election as “a Russian special operation”, but the governing Georgian Dream party insists that it is not pro-Moscow and won fairly on what it calls a policy of peace, which hinges on not antagonising a northern neighbour that already controls 20 per cent of the state’s territory.

“We have to recognise [that] in Georgia, for today, Russia won. First, they took part of Georgia, then changed their policy, changed their government and now they have pro-Russian government, pro-Russian positions, no sanctions against Putin,” Mr Zelenskiy said in English on Wednesday.

On Moldova he warned: “You will see, Russia is on the way. They want to do the same and they will do it, of course, if the West does not stop the dialogues about crossing the red lines. If they don’t stop this, just continue rhetoric, they will lose Moldova in one or two years.”

[ Daniel McLaughlin in Georgia: History a political background in Stalin's homeland ]

Polls show that 80 per cent of Georgia’s 3.7 million people want to join the EU, but Georgian Dream’s pledge to preserve peace resonates in a country that lost a brief but costly conflict with Russia in 2008. Russia now keeps thousands of soldiers in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which it recognises as independent states.

The two provinces had Moscow’s help in breaking from Tbilisi’s control in fighting in the early 1990s, just as the Moldovan region of Transdniestria did in a brief war with the Chisinau government after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia does not recognise the region’s claim to independence, but props up its separatist regime and still stations about 1,500 troops there as what it calls a “peacekeeping” force.

Moscow used these “frozen conflicts” for decades to stymie Georgian and Moldovan integration with the EU and Nato, alongside an implied threat that war could flare again if the West pushed Russia too hard in what it calls its “near abroad”.

In Georgia in 2008, then Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and now in all of Ukraine, Russia has shown that it will fight to stop neighbours escaping its grip.

Most Georgians and Moldovans want to become part of the West, but they have also seen the price paid by Ukrainians for the same dream, and how the US and its allies – bound by their own fears of “red lines” and “escalation” – have not found the strength to change the Kremlin’s bloody calculations.