Try to hold them back! There are fewer and fewer of allies of Russia in the territory of the former USSR

Arkady Dubnov, journalist

By the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR and the creation of the CIS, the legalization of which took place in Alma-Ata on December 21, 1991, many words have already been said and a fair number of reasons for this have been named, for someone the latter, and for someone an extreme break in fate Russian empire.

Nothing fundamentally new was sounded.

The only thing that attracted attention was one of the two living patriarchs of the Soviet leadership, a former member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee and the head of Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. He reproached the Gorbachev leadership that came to power in the Union for the lack of political will, and announced perestroika and democratization. “Such changes had to be carried out in conditions of discipline, order, strong leadership”, - said the not-too-old patriarch, not yet 82 ...

The funny thing in his words is that he forgot - attempts to use "discipline, order and strong leadership" have already been tested in "Vilnius in the Baltics", as he recalls in the same commentary, complaining that Gorbachev "could not explain what happened there".

Yes, that is why I could not, because otherwise I had to admit to the collapse of the imperial instruments, sharpened by the communist ideology. The Soviet Union is not China, in which Nazarbayev's methods of holding on to power still appeal.

It's time to stop fooling yourself with hopes of victories in past wars. It is worth thinking about what is happening today in the spaces of the collapsed Union, and most importantly, how what is happening in the near and even distant future will come back to haunt.

There are two or even three segments of this imperial legacy - European, South Caucasian and Central Asian.

European - Ukraine and Moldova (we will take Belarus out of the brackets under the conditionally still capable dictator) are lost for a full return under the Kremlin's imperial umbrella. What is happening literally these days between Moscow and the collective West, in the future, may be assessed as the last battle to keep the European part of the former Soviet Union under the control of the former metropolis. Even if there is a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, local or God forbid, on a larger scale, in the near future it will not return the "mother of Russian cities" to the dominion of the Mother See.

The future stay in the field of Russian attraction of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia looks no less problematic. With more or less success, all of them, including Armenia, which is now almost entirely dependent on Russia, and autocratic Azerbaijan, eschew close relations with Moscow. Baku can be considered a part of the influential Turkic tandem with Ankara.

So today, with good reason, we can talk about the preservation of the orbit of Russian influence, albeit to a varying degree, only of the countries of Central Asia.

But here, too, profound changes are taking place, which cannot but worry the Kremlin. First of all, we are talking about a noticeable strengthening of the Turkic component in the foreign policy orientations of the region's capitals. The creation of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), formalized on November 12 of this year. in Istanbul, of which Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and as an observer - Turkmenistan became members, markedly changed the geopolitical landscape of the region. Nursultan Nazarbayev, considered one of the inspirers of the OTS, trying to justify the need for the Turkic trend in front of Moscow, discusses the usefulness of the combined actions of the OTS, the EAEU and the SCO.

But hardly anyone in the ruling Russian elite doubts that this rhetoric is just a screen covering new centrifugal trends in Central Asia, which are removing the region from under the Russian umbrella of patronage.

Already the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan signed a Declaration on Allied Relations in early December. And in Tashkent, after this, the "inaugural meeting" of the Strategic Partnership Dialogue between Uzbekistan and the United States took place.

Try to keep them...

Original: telegram channel "About the country and the world"