THANKS, UR!:

The image of a resurgent Russia ready and willing to protect its perceived interests in the former Soviet Union was bolstered by its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine crisis of 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and intervened militarily to back an armed insurrection in the Donbas after the downfall of a Moscow-friendly president in Kyiv.

President Vladimir Putin has sought to defend Russia's status as a premier power broker even as he has publicly advocated allowing foreign countries to sort out their own problems, railing against Western influence and shoring up support for his counterparts in a region accustomed to volatility.

Even by those turbulent standards, 2020 has produced something akin to a perfect storm of upheaval stretching in an arc from Minsk to Moldova through the South Caucasus and Central Asia. And while Moscow has appeared to stand by and watch things develop, at least at first, analysts say the outwardly less assertive stance is testament to a more calculated approach based on an awareness of its limitations, rather than a geopolitical retreat.

"As far as Moscow is concerned, all the countries that emerged from the ex-Soviet republics are on their own," Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a recent column. "To Russia, 30 years after the breakup of the U.S.S.R., they are all foreign states; emotions are kept apart from politics: There are no special attachments, and no free discounts."

The new approach may be heavily driven by financial imperatives.

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