President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to keep Russia’s immediate neighbors close are unraveling, with the citizens of Moldova joining those of Kyrgyzstan and Belarus in signaling in recent days and months that they have lost patience with discredited Moscow-backed leaders.
The aftermath of elections in all three countries indicates that Putin’s policy of backing allied regimes in Russia’s historical sphere of influence is failing. Emerging democratic forces in slow-to-reform former communist states are pushing back against the Russian leader’s favored political system of managed democracy—a system comprising democratic elements (parliaments, multiple parties, and elections) that mask de facto autocracy, with the same authoritarian leaders and their parties elected to office time after time, through ballot and media manipulation.
