A Distracted Russia Is Losing Its Grip on Its Old Soviet Sphere
Andrew Higgins Sergey Ponomarev
Russia’s domination of Central Asia and the Caucasus region is unraveling as the Kremlin focuses on the war in Ukraine — and border violence is flaring.
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With the Kremlin distracted by its flagging war more than 1,500 miles away in Ukraine, Russia’s dominium over its old Soviet empire shows signs of unraveling. Moscow has lost its aura and its grip, creating a disorderly vacuum that previously obedient former Soviet satraps, as well as China, are moving to fill.

On the mountain-flanked steppes of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, the result in just one remote village has been devastating: homes reduced to rubble, a burned-out school and a gut-wrenching stench emanating from the rotting carcasses of 24,000 dead chickens.

All fell victim last month to the worst violence to hit the area since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union — a brief but bloody border conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both members of a Russia-led military alliance dedicated to preserving peace but which did nothing to halt the mayhem.

“Of course, they are distracted by Ukraine,” Kyrgyzstan’s president, Sadyr Japarov, lamented in an interview in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.

Before President Vladimir V. Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Russia played an outsize role in the affairs of Central Asia and also the volatile Caucasus region, in what had passed for a far-flung Pax Russica. In January, it rushed troops to Kazakhstan to help the government there calm a wave of violent domestic unrest. In 2020, it sent around 2,000 armed “peacekeepers” to the Caucasus to enforce a Moscow-mediated truce between Armenia and Azerbaijan.