The causes and dynamics of authoritarian consolidation observed in the Russian Federation are of significant relevance in the context of international relations, political science, and global security. In particular, the nature of the political regime formed during Vladimir Putin’s rule and the course it has taken in relations with the West has had profound consequences not only for Russia but also for European and transatlantic security architecture. Naturally, the current situation and ongoing processes have not been shaped unilaterally. One of the crucial aspects of this process is the question of whether the strategic and normative mistakes—or miscalculations—made by the West in its Russia policy played an indirect or direct role in strengthening authoritarianism.
Introduction
While it was still too early to speak about the regional or geopolitical consequences of power being handed from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin, there was already a general consensus that after the December 1999 parliamentary elections and the March 2000 snap presidential elections, Russia had become a different country (Jamestown, 2000). But 25 years later, as Russia enters the third year of its full-scale war against Ukraine, what do we see? In 2024, the authorities further intensified their pressure on civil society and dissent, labeling critics as “foreign agents,” “undesirable,” or “extremists,” targeting them with massive fines and long prison sentences (Human Rights Watch, 2025). In fact, not only has there been no positive change, but a very serious regression has taken place. It is precisely for this reason that within Western academic circles, the role—or mistake—of Western political centers in Russia’s, and particularly Putin’s, authoritarian revanche is not interpreted unequivocally. There are contradictory approaches and differing opinions in this regard. Of course, each perspective has its own logic, but the paradoxes can be so sharp that even identifying a middle ground becomes difficult. In this sense, we should view the contradictory perspectives in the academic literature as political knots in the mind of the Western camp—that is, as the still unresolved, unopened knot of the “Russia question.”
The aim of this paper is to explore the effects of Western policies against the backdrop of authoritarian hardening in Russia, in order to understand both the causes and the consequences of the authoritarian revanche process in Russia. At the same time, it seeks to contribute to a proper assessment of the structural problems in Russia-West relations—currently the main topic of international discourse—and of the possible future of these relations.
The analysis will seek to answer the question: “How have Western policies and decisions regarding Russia influenced the formation of authoritarianism in this country?”
Focus
Attention will be directed to five main aspects:
- Russia’s reactions in the context of NATO enlargement;
- Economic policies during the transformation period and the role of Western technocrats;
- The West’s response to the weakening of human rights and democratic institutions;
- Energy cooperation and strategic concessions.
Relevance of the Topic
Against the backdrop of the revanche of Putin’s authoritarianism in Russia, this topic is important both theoretically and practically. From a theoretical perspective, the material seeks to explain the connection between the renewed concentration of authoritarianism and the strategies of international actors. From a practical perspective, it aims to determine which strategies might yield more sustainable results in dealing with a large and aggressive power like Russia.
The relevance of the issue is linked not only to Russia’s domestic politics, the deepening of Putinist repressions, and violations of international law, but also to the erosion of the international liberal order against the background of security threats emanating from Russia in Europe since 2014. Of course, post-Soviet countries are directly affected by this process, but if we consider that the issue concerns a member of the UN Security Council, the seriousness of the situation becomes even clearer.
The paper will draw on academic literature reflecting various theoretical perspectives such as neo-imperialism and post-Soviet transition models, while using reports by specialized international organizations and media sources presented through an analytical method.
The material will be presented across nine subheadings: General Picture, The Impact of NATO’s Enlargement Policy on Russia, Mistakes During the Transformation Process, Human Rights, Elections and Democracy, The West’s Failure to Correctly Assess Putin, Russia’s Natural Resources, Strategic Mistakes, Normative Mistakes, and finally, Conclusion.
Limitations: This analysis is based primarily on available literature, expert assessments, and open sources, as well as official statements. There is no access to internal diplomatic documents or classified strategic plans.
Did the West Provoke Russia?
NATO Enlargement. The intensification of Russia-West relations and Russia’s resort to aggression is not interpreted uniformly. While the general tendency is to emphasize Russia’s authoritarian nature, many authors think differently. In particular, theorists who argue that the West pursued a provocative policy toward Russia believe that the United States and its European allies bear responsibility for this crisis. According to their approach, the root of the problem lies in NATO’s enlargement.
Western leaders failed to understand that Putin’s reaction to Ukraine stemmed not from expansionism but from the fear of encirclement (Mearsheimer, 2014). This is not merely a theoretical perspective. We can also trace this reasoning in the speeches of current U.S. President Donald Trump, both before and after the 2024 presidential election. Referring to promises that Ukraine would one day join NATO, Trump said: “You can forget NATO, I think the main reason this whole thing started is probably that” (Euromaidan, 2025). This is not only a theoretical viewpoint but also a practical political opinion that managed to reach the White House itself. In other words, some circles in the West believe that the war Russia started is a response to Western geopolitical provocation: that the West, by expanding into Russia’s spheres of influence—or attempting to—forced the Kremlin to react.
Should NATO Have Not Expanded?
Although not fully agreeing with Mearsheimer, historian Stephen Cohen of New York and Princeton Universities, an analyst of Russia-NATO relations, also emphasized the issue of NATO enlargement. He argued that after the collapse of the USSR, the West should have pursued a Europe-centered policy, avoided NATO enlargement, and instead prioritized cooperation with Russia. Instead of cooperation, the West’s effort to enlarge NATO created deep distrust of the West within Russia and laid the foundations of a new Cold War (Cohen, 2009).
Theoretically, one might grant him some validity. However, certain empirical examples that have become facts suggest that rapprochement with Russia is not sufficient to curb its aggression. While not completely refuting the claim, we can point to the high-level relations between Germany and Russia during Merkel’s tenure. For example, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder even held a senior position at Gazprom (Securingdemocracy, 2005). The important “Nord Stream 2” energy pipeline was built. Despite being constructed by Gazprom, formally tied to the Kremlin and personally supported by Putin, and financed by a consortium of German, French, British, Dutch, and Austrian oil and gas companies, the political ownership of this project lay entirely with Berlin (Brookings, 2015). Yet this cooperation did not lead to Russia’s relations with Europe improving on a solid basis; on the contrary, it gave rise to new demands against Europe.
This brief comparison shows that rapprochement with Russia could not prevent the Kremlin’s expansionist ambitions. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shocked the West. Despite the annexation of Crimea in 2014, most Western centers did not believe that the Kremlin would go further. They adopted an overly cautious approach, thinking Putin’s imperial ambitions were much smaller in scale, or deliberately chose to ignore them (Atlantic Council, 2024).
We can also see that cooperation with Russia does not guarantee protection from its aggression by looking at the Kremlin’s attitude toward countries that did not stray far from Russia’s orbit and were even in the same bloc with it. For example, Russia has repeatedly called former Soviet countries “quasi-states,” that is, pseudo-states. Putin even claimed that Kazakhstan had no statehood history, despite offering personal reverence to Nazarbayev (Voice of America, 2014). Thus, cooperation with Russia, closeness to it, and being in not just one but three blocs with it—the CIS, CSTO, and the Eurasian Union—does not protect anyone from Russia’s threat.
Therefore, the conclusion of this section is that contrary to some claims, being close to Russia and pursuing Russia-centered policies does not turn it into a friendly state. Russia bares its teeth even toward countries that are members of blocs it organizes and leads. However, the existence of the perspectives presented above is both natural and serves as one of the tools for understanding the process of studying Russia within the West.
Transformation Crisis
Privatization. Canadian journalist and researcher Naomi Klein, who argues that the West’s turning a blind eye to the negatives observed during Russia’s transition from a socialist economic system to a capitalist, neoliberal system had grave consequences, believes that Western “engineering” played a role in producing this outcome. The transition to capitalism in Russia was accompanied by mass poverty, the plundering of state property, and the birth of a mafia class—all of which were applauded by Western economists. The West did not merely watch Russia slide into kleptocracy—it engineered and legitimized the process (Klein, 2007a). Here, the issue is not only the lack of timely, more precise interventions, but also the overlooking and applauding of the negative process underway. The privatization process was neither fair nor transparent; as a result, corruption deepened and the economic power of the oligarchs increased (Stiglitz, 2002). It appears that the early evolutionary period of oligarchy in Russia should also be understood as a period of decline for the liberal economy and the policies based on it. Because the liberal economy in Russia was knocked out before it could take its most fragile first steps. In its place, trade relations dominated by mafia and criminal networks emerged. In the 1990s, state property in Russia was privatized not through genuine market relations and actors, but through violence, deceptive methods, and with the consent of Western consultants (Hoffman, 2002).
As a result, Putin emerged as the heir to a criminal system and used those mechanisms to consolidate his personal authoritarian rule (Satter, 2003). In other words, the West’s ceding space to authoritarian oligarchy on such a strategic issue as privatization did not go without consequence. In fact, one of the main outcomes of this process was that relatively independent business, formed prior to Putin’s rule, became a target in Russia. They were not only competitors to the oligarchy in the economic realm; they were also regarded as obstacles politically. For this reason, the arrest and departure from the country of businessmen formed during the previous administration gained particular momentum in the early years of Putin’s rule (Khodorkovsky, 2005). Against the backdrop of such events, the ongoing process created the impression less of privatization and more of redistribution of property. It was not a difficult question to answer which direction Russia was heading with such a policy. The West had relegated these issues to the back burner.
Counterterrorism Operations and Energy Policy vs. Human Rights: The view that the West stimulated negative transformation in Russia is evident not only in the economy and the strengthening of oligarchy, but also in the sphere of human rights—the pragmatic cooperation policy of Washington led to turning a blind eye to Russia’s internal transformation toward authoritarianism. The West prioritized counterterrorism and energy interests over the promotion of human rights and democracy in Russia (Stent, 2014). We can say this represents a serious political confession. A similar idea was voiced by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a speech at Cairo University in Egypt: “For 60 years, my country—the United States—pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region—and we achieved neither” (OCALA, 2007). Although the Secretary of State uttered these words with regard to another region, Russia by now hardly differs from that region in terms of its human rights situation. From this perspective, if we analyze that statement as a general approach as well, we will not stray far from the truth.
There is no doubt that the events of September 11, 2001 (the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States) were the most important development that forced Washington to move closer to Russia in the fight against terrorism. In this context, the issue of human rights increasingly receded into the background. For after this event, the United States began to recognize Russia’s operations in Chechnya and Georgia as counterterrorism operations and as a struggle against fundamentalist religious groups (Carnegie Endowment, 2002).
The West’s ambivalent approach could, of course, not go unnoticed. International human rights organizations saw this situation and emphasized issues of responsibility (HRW, 2004). It should, of course, have been predictable that Russia—long comfortable within the frameworks of PACE and the OSCE—would be contemplating deeper plans to strengthen authoritarianism.
Despite reports and criticisms by international human rights organizations, the cooperation of Western states with Russia ultimately changed the attitude of both these organizations themselves and of others toward human rights. At the subsequent stage, no attention at all was paid to the reports and statements of those organizations. In other words, one of the serious early mistakes in this area was that Western institutions and states refused to rely on international human rights organizations. Another event that stands out within the framework of human rights and democracy is the West’s muted reaction to Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 (BBC, 2018). Medvedev’s powerless governance and his failure even to put himself forward as a candidate for the next term fostered in the West the idea that Putin was the real master of Russia anyway, and that it would be better to work with him not indirectly but directly.
Misreading
In fact, presenting Putin as merely the institutional heir of Yeltsin on a single parameter is wrong: he should also be seen as Yeltsin’s heir in the context of authoritarian governance. Yeltsin’s renunciation of democracy did not begin with handing over power to Putin. The foundations of his antidemocratic turn were laid after the 1993 elections, when he dissolved the Duma and brought the legislative branch fully under control (Kharcenter, 2025). That is, when assessing Putin, it would be incorrect to treat him as a phenomenon separate from Russian political traditions and to set aside the principle of historicity and traditional succession. Rather than presenting Putin as the person who diverted Russia from the democratic path, it is more appropriate to view him as the political figure who took this baton from Yeltsin but advanced it more “successfully,” and, in this parallel, not to forget the historical political context.
The West’s decisive mistake was first to accept Putin as a future liberal democrat, and then as the devil of the Cold War—both approaches strengthened his myth. The more Putin is misread, the stronger he becomes. Western diplomacy gave him many opportunities to play this role. (Galeotti 2019, 47) In Galeotti’s view, both of these approaches were wrong. And the worst part is that both served Putin’s interests. On the one hand, domestically he presented himself as a leader “fighting against external enemies.” On the other hand, he turned the West’s fears and confusion into an opportunity and acted more freely on the international stage. That is, in the West they have never truly understood Putin. Initially, they accepted him as an intelligent and modern technocrat who, after Yeltsin, would bring stability to the country and believed that over time Putin would move toward liberal democracy. But that was more wish than reality. Later, the situation changed—especially with the annexation of Crimea. This time, the West began to present Putin as a sort of predator, a symbol of a new Cold War. It seems that finding the correct middle path between these two approaches was not easy. That path, undoubtedly, could have been the proportional use of pressure—the common language understood by all dictators. The key message is simple: Putin is neither a savior nor a demon. He is a pragmatic, authoritarian political type who systematically preserves his power, ideologizes the use of force, and relies on aggression; and to understand him, one must look not at myths but at reality.
Vast Territory, Rich Resources, Singular Rule
Among the factors that encourage authoritarian centralization in Russia and its claims to regional-global expansion, one cannot overlook its vast territories and rich resources. Former U.S. statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski also believes that Russia is an important country due to many of its resources and its nuclear weapons (Russiamatters, 2017). In this case, the resources at Russia’s disposal naturally impede a change in its antidemocratic nature. This creates new challenges for Western countries. If Russia’s possession of such vast territory and resources is also a threat, then what should be done? There are opinions that these territories and resources should be divided (Threeman, 2022). The emergence of such ideas stems from the conclusion within Western academic and political circles that the West has failed to reform and integrate Russia within itself. Russia’s vast territory and rich resources can naturally be seen as an obstacle to this. In other words, Russia, with its current physical geographical map, is a complex object for Western political institutions and instruments.
From this, the conclusion emerges that there are proponents of Russia’s disintegration and that without such a breakup, political-cultural integration with Russia is very difficult, even impossible. Nevertheless, it is a bitter truth that Russia policy has been conducted in the West without a serious strategic approach. We present the arguments underpinning this below, in the sections titled “Strategic Mistakes” and “Normative Mistakes.”
Strategic Mistakes
At the strategic level, the West acted toward Russia with miscalculations and unrealistic expectations.
- Communication gap regarding NATO enlargement—failing to sufficiently consider that eastward expansion would be perceived by Russia as a threat left the West in a confused position;
- Support for the post-Soviet transition model: the “shock therapy” and rapid privatization model implemented in the 1990s led to a flourishing of corruption and the formation of oligarchic rule, and as a result to a strengthening of Soviet nostalgia and a discrediting of liberalism in Russia. The West did not want to see the negative consequences of this model (Klein, 2007b);
- An overly personalized leadership prism toward the Kremlin: placing excessive importance on personal relations with Putin deepened systemic problems and strengthened his authoritarian governance;
- Crisis-centered policy—dialogue with Russia intensified mainly at moments of crisis, but no preventive policy was formed that could avert long-term risks;
- Failure to consider energy dependence as a strategic threat—since Western countries did not implement energy diversification plans early enough, Russia increased its geopolitical influence in this area (Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, 2015).
Normative Mistakes
The normative mistakes in the West’s Russia policy stemmed mainly from inconsistency toward the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
- Selective democratic agenda—in relations with Russia, democracy and human rights were highlighted only during crises, while in stable periods these issues were sacrificed to economic and security interests;
- Adaptation to authoritarianism—although the authoritarian tendencies of Putin’s rule were evident at an early stage, the West for a long time presented him as a “reform-oriented leader,” turning a blind eye to domestic political repressions (McFaul, 2001);
- Prioritization of energy cooperation—instead of reducing energy dependence, the European Union and the United States pursued deep integration with Russia in the energy market, as a result of which the Kremlin formed instruments of economic leverage as a means of political influence;
- Normative ambivalence—in the cases of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), actions contrary to international law were strongly condemned rhetorically, but practical sanctions and political pressure mechanisms were either delayed or applied in a limited fashion (Michael McFaul, 2018).
These normative inconsistencies indirectly supported the weakening of democratic institutions in Russia, the squeezing of civil society, and the gaining of legitimacy by the authoritarian regime. As can be seen, while strategic mistakes reveal the failure to choose the right political approaches and the inadequacy of decisions in empirical matters, normative mistakes expose gaps in moral and principled areas such as human rights and democracy.
Conclusion
The general conclusion of the analysis is that the West’s main mistake in relations with Russia was not, as some authors claim, provoking it or failing to cooperate more constructively with it, but rather prioritizing a policy of selective cooperation—placing energy and security interests, particularly the fight against international terrorism, ahead of human rights and democracy. The West’s silence in the face of violations in this area and democratic backsliding indirectly created conditions for the revanche of Russian authoritarianism and the resurgence of its imperialist ambitions.
Another conclusion is that the West displayed a tough stance only during periods of open confrontation with Russia or when Russia openly attacked its regional and global interests; however, in a long-term strategic approach, it did not pursue an open and principled policy to preempt Moscow’s domestic political steps and to support the democratic opposition and civil society.
At a time when Russia refuses to confine its authoritarianism within its borders and continues an open war to spread it across the region, the conclusions put forward by this material become even more significant. It is now evident that, as exemplified by Ukraine, Russia poses a more serious threat to the independence of countries and the freedom of peoples, and that this situation did not arise unilaterally. By analyzing the process in question, we deem certain steps necessary to curb this aggressive expansion:
Recommendations:
- In the current state of U.S.-Russia relations, the West—especially the EU—must prioritize human rights and democracy over energy and security interests. Against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, it became clear that without democracy there is no security, and without security there is no energy;
- Provide robust support for the reorganization and strengthening of democratic institutions in post-Soviet countries that gained independence from Russia and continue to face threats to that independence from Russia;
- Taking into account that sanctions alone are not sufficient to neutralize Russia’s intention and policy to rebuild an empire, strengthen preventive work in the fields of information and anti-disinformation.
In the future, topics such as a detailed study of the “soft power” dynamics in Russia-West relations, “the impact of energy dependence on political decisions,” as well as a “comparative analysis of the strategies applied by the West in different regions (Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia),” and “Russia as a role model in conflict with the West” could be explored.
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