Authors

Discussion

There have been countless predictions of centrifugal forces leading to the decline of economic, political and social connections between countries, which once constituted the Soviet Union, in the last decades. The war in Ukraine appears to become a decisive factor of transformation of this space. Yet the direction of this transformation is much less clear than many would assume. On the one hand, economic problems Russia is experiencing, international sanctions and perception of Russia as unpredictable and threatening drive Russia’s neighbors to distance themselves from Russia. On the other hand, however, precisely the same factors are reasons to maintain relations to Russia to prevent escalation and to benefit from economic arbitrage. The way how individual countries in the post-Soviet Eurasia balance these options differs, and depends on the specific economic and political conditions they find themselves in. At the same time, one also observes an increasing importance of regional political orders in individual parts of Eurasia, especially in Central Asia. The developments in the region depend not only on the interaction of its countries with Russia, but also on broader political and economic context, specifically, the increasing fragmentation of the world into competing blocs.