The Russia Problem: Managing Moscow Without Surrendering the Field

Russia presents the American Eurasian strategy with a defining paradox. It is simultaneously an adversary, an active military aggressor in Europe whose actions have fundamentally altered the security landscape on the continent, and a country that occupies the geographic center of Eurasia in ways that cannot be managed around through pure avoidance. The Trans-Siberian Railway, the pipeline networks running from Siberia to Europe and China, the Russian language and cultural influence extending across Central Asia and the Caucasus: these are not preferences that can be wished away. They are structural realities that any serious Eurasian strategy must account for, not pretend do not exist.

The starting point for honest analysis is that full normalization of the U.S.-Russia relationship is not a near-term possibility. As long as Russia continues its war in Ukraine and refuses to engage with the international legal framework governing territorial integrity, the political and moral case for maintaining sanctions and international isolation is overwhelming. The United States should not pretend otherwise, and no amount of strategic maneuvering changes that fundamental reality. The question is not whether to normalize. It is about managing a difficult relationship over an extended period in ways that minimize damage and preserve the possibility of something better.

The EAEU as Leverage

The Eurasian Economic Union provides a useful lens for understanding the opportunity structure within the Russian space. Russia's economic union with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan functions more as an instrument for maintaining Russian influence than as a genuinely mutually beneficial economic arrangement. The sanctions imposed after 2022 have made Russia a less attractive economic anchor for EAEU members. Kazakhstan, in particular, has been explicit about its desire to maintain economic relationships with Western countries and to resist any pressure to circumvent sanctions on Russia's behalf. This creates a real opportunity for American engagement, not by asking these countries to break with Russia, which is unrealistic and would impose costs they cannot afford, but by making American economic partnership sufficiently valuable that they can maintain genuine strategic autonomy.

For Kazakhstan specifically, the U.S. approach should respect its multi-vector foreign policy while ramping up trade and investment that gives Nur-Sultan leverage within the bloc relative to Moscow. A Kazakhstan that is economically strong and globally connected can assert more autonomy within the EAEU than one that is dependent on Russian transit routes, Russian banking relationships, and Russian investment for basic economic function. Armenia, a deeply frustrated EAEU member increasingly skeptical of the economic benefits and disappointed by Russian security failures in Nagorno-Karabakh, is actively courting alternative partnerships. Modest American support for Armenia's technology sector and energy diversification reduces its sense of captivity within Russia's framework without requiring a dramatic break that Yerevan is not positioned to make.

The Middle Corridor as a Strategic Tool

The Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor is the most important single infrastructure project for reducing Russian structural leverage in Eurasia. Every ton of Central Asian exports that flows westward via the Trans-Caspian route rather than through Russian territory reduces the transit dependence that has historically made these states economically beholden to Russian goodwill. The corridor's growth since 2022, driven in part by the desire to avoid exposure to secondary sanctions from Russian transit, has already demonstrated this dynamic in real commercial terms. Accelerating the corridor's development is both an economic investment and a concrete step toward loosening a structural dependency that has constrained Central Asian foreign policy for decades.

The practical steps are described in the infrastructure article earlier in this series. The strategic logic bears repeating: infrastructure that routes trade around Russian territory reduces the leverage that Russian control of transit has provided for decades. It is competition at the structural level, below the threshold of direct confrontation, and it produces lasting results that persist through political cycles.

Track II and Long-Term Positioning

Track II diplomacy deserves more investment than it currently receives in the U.S.-Russia context. Official channels are frozen by necessity. But unofficial channels, former officials, academics, scientists, and civil society organizations, can maintain communications that will matter enormously when conditions eventually change. The people who know their counterparts, who have negotiated with them, who understand their constraints and interests, are an institutional asset that atrophies if not maintained.

Arms control is the most obvious domain for Track II engagement. The collapse of the INF Treaty, the expiration of New START, and the general deterioration of nuclear risk-management frameworks pose dangers that are not in either country's interest. The world is entering a period of deep uncertainty about nuclear posture, missile deployment, and escalation risk with fewer formal guardrails than at any point since the early Cold War. Quiet conversations among technical experts about arms control verification concepts, crisis communication mechanisms, and strategic stability principles help preserve the institutional knowledge and personal relationships that would be essential in any future negotiation.

Arctic governance is another domain where track II engagement has value. The warming of the Arctic is creating new shipping routes, new resource extraction opportunities, and new military competition in a region where Russia, the United States, Canada, and the Nordic states all have significant interests. The collapse of Arctic Council engagement following the invasion of Ukraine has left an institutional void that creates risks. Maintaining scientific and technical conversations about Arctic ecosystems, shipping safety, and search-and-rescue cooperation through non-governmental channels preserves some functional connection in a region where practical cooperation has genuine value for all parties.

Energy and the Post-War Landscape

Energy represents a longer-term dimension of the Russia strategy. European energy diversification away from Russian gas supply, one of the most significant strategic realignments of the decade, creates both opportunity and risk. The opportunity is in cementing European energy independence through LNG infrastructure, renewable energy development, and nuclear power cooperation that uses American small modular reactor technology. The risk is that replacing the Russian supply creates new dependencies on other suppliers who may not be reliable partners.

American small modular reactor technology represents both a commercial opportunity and a strategic instrument. Helping Eastern European countries that operated Soviet-era nuclear plants replace aging reactors with American SMR technology would provide clean energy, reduce residual dependence on Russian nuclear fuel cycles, and embed American technology companies in European energy infrastructure for the long term. The commercial and strategic cases for this investment point in the same direction.

The honest conclusion about Russia is that the U.S. should manage it firmly in the short term, compete with its influence actively in the medium term, and maintain the institutional capacity for a better relationship in the long term. Patient strategy is not a weakness. It is the recognition that Russia will not always be governed by its current leadership, and that the connections and frameworks preserved or built during this difficult period are investments in the future.

Civil Society and the Long Game

Civil society engagement in Russia itself is a long-game investment that should not be abandoned despite the difficulty of the current moment. The Russian population is not identical to the Russian government, and the future of Russia's relationship with the West will depend in part on what kind of society emerges from the current political and military crisis. Supporting access to uncensored information, funding Russian-language independent journalism, and maintaining academic and cultural exchange with individual Russians who are not associated with the regime's security apparatus keeps alive the possibility of a different relationship in a different political era.

This is patient work with no near-term payoff. But the United States made similar long-term investments during the Cold War, in radio broadcasting, in exchange programs, in the dissemination of ideas across the Iron Curtain, and those investments contributed to the eventual outcome. The Russian society that emerges from the current period will have been shaped by what it was exposed to and what connections it maintained with the outside world. American strategy should influence that shaping where it can, with realistic expectations about the timeline.

The honest conclusion about Russia is that the United States should manage it firmly in the short term, compete with its influence actively across the EAEU periphery in the medium term, and maintain the institutional capacity for a better relationship in the long term. That is not a weakness. It is the strategic recognition that countries, like people, change over time, and that the investments made during difficult periods can determine what becomes possible when conditions improve.