Russia's current predicament: its war in Ukraine, economic isolation, demographic pressure, and deepening confrontation with the West, cannot be understood by looking only at the last few years. The roots reach into the final decades of the Soviet Union and the chaotic early years of what followed.
Conventional wisdom often cites the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as the beginning of Moscow's unraveling. It is a tidy narrative, but a misleading one. Great powers absorb military setbacks all the time. Britain survived the Boer War. The United States survived Vietnam. Russia itself survived catastrophic defeats in the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War.
A draining conflict on the periphery does not hollow out an empire — it is the choices made at the center that do.
Three decisions stand apart as genuinely consequential: permitting the Soviet Union to dissolve, withdrawing from Eastern Europe without extracting meaningful concessions, and building an economy on hydrocarbons — a strategy that generated enormous power while quietly constructing the conditions for Russia's encirclement. Each of these choices deserves serious examination.
The First Mistake: Surrendering the Empire
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was not merely a political event. It was one of the largest voluntary surrenders of geopolitical capital in modern history — accomplished, remarkably, without a serious military effort to prevent it.
Russia lost control over vast territories, industrial infrastructure, military installations, and tens of millions of ethnic Russians who woke up as citizens of foreign states. More fundamentally, it surrendered strategic depth. Russian security doctrine had always depended on buffers — the immense distances that had exhausted Napoleon and swallowed Hitler's armies. When the Soviet Union fractured, that buffer system collapsed overnight.
What is striking is not that the union was under pressure. By the late 1980s, economic stagnation, restless nationalisms, and political paralysis had created genuine instability. The argument that preservation was impossible is reasonable. But it is not decisive. States facing existential pressure routinely fight for their survival. China held together through the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.
The United States fought the bloodiest war in its history to prevent secession. Russia itself waged two brutal campaigns in Chechnya rather than accept the loss of a single region. The Soviet leadership, by contrast, largely stood aside.
The question is not whether the union could have survived in its exact form — almost certainly not. The question is whether Moscow could have negotiated a looser confederation, delayed the fragmentation long enough to shape its terms, or ensured that newly independent states remained within a Russian-dominated political and security framework.
Instead, Russia inherited the debts and obligations of the Soviet state while surrendering the geopolitical reach that had given those obligations meaning. It was the worst possible outcome: all of the liability, stripped of the power.
The Second Mistake: Leaving Europe Without a Settlement
If the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a strategic catastrophe, the manner of Russia's withdrawal from Eastern Europe was a diplomatic failure of nearly equal magnitude.
At the Cold War's end, Moscow exercised decisive influence over one of the largest spheres of influence in modern history — East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania. When this system unraveled, Soviet and then Russian negotiators withdrew without securing a comprehensive and legally binding security framework for the European order that would follow.
The most consequential concession was Germany. Soviet acceptance of German reunification fundamentally altered the European balance of power.
A reunified Germany anchored in NATO was a transformative strategic outcome — and Moscow accepted it without obtaining enforceable restrictions on future alliance expansion or durable guarantees about the military architecture of post-Cold War Europe. What was offered instead were verbal assurances, whose precise meaning has been disputed ever since.
Western commentators correctly note that no formal treaty prohibited NATO enlargement, and that Eastern European nations sought membership voluntarily, driven by well-founded historical anxieties about Russian power. Both points are true. Neither addresses the core strategic question: why did Russian negotiators surrender leverage without converting it into durable, institutionalized security guarantees?
The answer may lie in the optimism of the moment. Some in Moscow genuinely believed that Russia would be integrated into a post-Cold War European order, or that the United States would exercise restraint as Russia recovered. That optimism proved catastrophically misplaced. NATO expanded through five successive waves.
Countries that had formed the backbone of Soviet strategic depth — Poland, the Baltic states, eventually Romania and Bulgaria — joined a military alliance built to contain Soviet power. Russia found itself with a smaller security perimeter than it had possessed even at the moment of collapse.
Great powers negotiate from strength or they do not negotiate at all. Moscow had leverage in 1990 and 1991 that it would never possess again. It chose not to use it.
The Third Mistake: The Energy Trap
Russia's transformation into an energy superpower is usually described as one of its great post-Soviet achievements — and by conventional metrics, it was. Hydrocarbon revenues rebuilt the state's finances, restored military capacity after the chaos of the 1990s, and gave Moscow a potent instrument of influence over energy-dependent European markets. For roughly two decades, the strategy appeared to work.
But it contained a structural flaw that became increasingly visible as relations with the West deteriorated.
By embedding itself so deeply in global energy markets — markets that operate overwhelmingly through dollar-denominated transactions — Russia simultaneously increased its economic power and its economic exposure. The petrodollar system, consolidated after the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, ensured that global energy trade reinforced demand for the dollar and, by extension, the institutional architecture Washington had built around it. Russia was not marginal to this system. It was one of its principal engines.
This created a paradox. The more indispensable Russia became as an energy exporter, the more visible and vulnerable its chokepoints became. When confrontation with the West escalated after 2014 and then dramatically after 2022, that vulnerability was weaponized.
Sanctions targeted the energy sector. European countries, however slowly and painfully, reduced their dependence on Russian gas. Technologies Russia needed to develop its next generation of hydrocarbon resources were restricted. The revenues that had financed military modernization became a point of siege rather than a source of strength.
Russia had built its recovery on an industry that required deep integration with the very international financial system its foreign policy was increasingly challenging. It was not a position from which confrontation could be sustained indefinitely. The energy sector gave Russia power over European buyers while simultaneously giving Western financial institutions power over Russia. Neither side fully grasped the symmetry until it was too late to dissolve it cleanly.
Ukraine and the Weight of History
The war in Ukraine cannot be understood apart from these three failures. It is not simply a bilateral dispute over territory, nor is it simply a Western proxy conflict — though it has unmistakably acquired the character of one.
Ukraine represents the convergence of all three strategic errors. It is a former Soviet republic that Moscow failed to retain within a coherent political framework. It is a country on the edge of a NATO alliance whose expansion Russia failed to prevent or constrain. And it has become the primary battlefield on which Western sanctions, including those targeting Russia's energy revenues, are being wielded as an instrument of strategic pressure.
Reducing the conflict to great-power chess risks erasing Ukraine's own political agency — the genuine fears, aspirations, and choices of a nation that has been fighting, at enormous cost, for its survival. But it would be equally distorting to pretend that the geopolitical dimension is incidental. The war has accelerated precisely the trends Russia sought to halt: NATO has expanded, European energy dependence on Russia has collapsed, and Western defense spending has risen.
Whatever the military outcome, Russia's strategic position in Europe is worse than it was before the invasion.
The Price of Miscalculation
Russia's current trajectory is not the product of one leader's decisions, or one bad year, or one miscalculated military operation. It is the accumulated result of choices made across three decades of extraordinary historical transition — choices that, taken together, left Russia with fewer strategic assets, a more exposed economic model, and a security environment it could neither accept nor effectively reshape.
None of this means that the alternative choices would have been simple, or that outcomes were ever fully within Moscow's control. The Soviet Union faced real contradictions. NATO enlargement reflected real choices by real sovereign governments. Energy development was, in many ways, Russia's most rational available path after 1991. The counterarguments deserve honest engagement.
But the pattern that emerges from the post-Cold War decades is consistent. At each critical juncture — the dissolution of the union, the withdrawal from Europe, the construction of an energy-dependent economy — Russia made choices that prioritized short-term stability or incremental gain over the kind of durable structural leverage that shapes international orders for generations.
The post-Cold War moment offered Russia a rare opportunity: to negotiate the terms of a new European security architecture from a position that, however weakened, still commanded serious attention. That window closed. The costs of its closure are now being paid in full.
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