The unprovoked Russian escalation of the war in Ukraine since 24 February 2022 led three countries in the EU-Russia ‘shared neighbourhood’ to seek further integration with the EU. Having been previously denied a membership perspective, two countries have since received EU candidate status. In the literature, this competition is seen as one between two actors that differ significantly in their nature and therefore their foreign policy approaches. This paper subsumes the separate meso-level theorizations under the concept of hegemony thereby rendering EU and Russian modes of influence comparable for empirical analysis. The conceptual framework is based on three ideal-typical mechanisms of hegemonic power - coercion, prescription, and co-optation - that are applied to the cases of Moldova and Armenia. The analysis is based on a novel dataset of 47 interviews with EU, Russian, Armenian, and Moldovan government officials, religious, business, and civil society representatives and two observations conducted between 2019 and 2021. Through concept building this paper contributes to a new research agenda on comparative neighbourhood policy studies shedding light on the similarities and differences of regional powers’ hegemonic influence in overlapping neighbourhoods.