Pro-Putin Movement Spreading Fast Across Ex-Soviet Bloc

Despite securing less than half of the vote in European elections for the first time in two decades, Orbán doubled down on his pro-Putin stance.

He was the first prime minister of any EU and NATO member to shake hands with Putin. In October 2023 in Beijing, he repeated the same stunt in Moscow just days after Hungary assumed the EU's rotating presidency in July 2024.

His Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, regained his country's premiership in October 2023, also on a more pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian platform.

In contrast to Orban, Fico is a left-wing populist and has moderated his stance on Ukraine following a visit to Kiev in January 2024. Yet the broader pro-Russian sentiment among most of the electorate was evident in the presidential elections in April 2024.

Outside NATO and the EU, other leaders have also cozied up to Putin. One example is Azerbaijan's long-serving ruler, Ilham Aliyev, who visited Moscow in April 2024 and welcomed Putin to Baku in August.

Since the start of the war against Ukraine in February 2022, Azerbaijan has been pivotal to Russia, providing access to trade corridors that are essential for circumventing Western sanctions. One of these is the international north-south transport corridor that links Russia through Azerbaijan to Iran.

Azerbaijan also submitted its official application to join the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) a day after Putin's visit in August. It also applied, at the end of July, for observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, bringing Azerbaijan one step closer to full membership in the Chinese-led bloc .

And then there is Georgia – once a beacon of democratic renewal in the post-Soviet space and now gradually sliding into pro-Russian autocracy. Despite the 2008 Russian-Georgian war Tbilisi and Moscow have gradually rekindled ties under the Georgian Dream political party, which has ruled the country for more than a decade.

Rhetorically, the Georgian government remains committed to EU membership. A December 2023 European Council decision granted Georgia candidate-country status. Yet relations with the EU have soured significantly since the spring when the government in Tbilisi rammed through the so-called foreign agents law despite public and EU protests.

The law presents a potentially useful tool for Georgia's government to constrain the work of pro-European civil society organizations and is modeled on recently expanded Russian legislation.

It clearly must be worrying for Ukraine and its Western partners that, more than two and a half years into a brutal war, Russia as the aggressor country enjoys a kind of resurgence in sympathy.

The increasing authoritarian drift in eastern Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Azerbaijan and Georgia did not start with the war in Ukraine but has undoubtedly accelerated as a result.

The political leaders driving it capitalize on, and carefully channel, different public sentiments. One of these is a long-standing fear of being dragged into a war with Russia. Another is the resentment of a self-serving political establishment that has mismanaged the fallout from Covid and the cost-of-living crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine.

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There is also, at least for some, a degree of nostalgia for an imagined Soviet bloc past and the“order” that strong – and essentially socially conservative – leaders at the time imposed, compared with the liberal“chaos” that has ensued since.

Last year's presidential elections in the Czech Republic and parliamentary elections in Poland demonstrate that the kind of democratic backsliding seen elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc can be halted and reversed.

Similarly, Armenia's decision to pull out of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization - a mini post-Soviet Warsaw Pact successor - indicates that geopolitical alignments are not set in stone.

All these changes are signs of an unsettled European and global security order. When and how the war in Ukraine ends will determine what kind of new order is likely to settle in.

However, with the simultaneous rise in right- and left-wing populism, and of older and newer autocracies and their ideological alignment with the Kremlin comes a note of extreme caution that the reconstitution of a new liberal order is far from certain - regardless of who, if anyone, wins in Ukraine.

Stefan Wolff is a professor of international security at the University of Birmingham .

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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