Ukraine and the Debacle of Russian Soft Power

ABSTRACT

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated Russia’s incapacity to implement a foreign policy strategy without resorting to hard power means, exposing the limits in its soft power capacity to ‘attract’ and ‘persuade’. Specifically, Russian soft power in Ukraine built around the model of the ‘Russian world’ (Russkiy Mir) was unable to persuade Kyiv to align with Moscow through peaceable means. Simultaneously, EU-inspired soft power based on the idea of ‘Greater Europe’ and Ukrainian ‘Europeanness’ conceived through the normative prism of liberal-democratic values and the potential of higher levels of economic development, limited the impact of Russia’s soft power in Ukraine. Russian soft power in Ukraine was not inspired by the idea of attraction but conceived as a propagandistic means to justify expansionist policies, merging de facto with hard power. After the 2022 invasion, in the occupied regions, Moscow’s influence could only be imposed coercively as an ancillary tool of hard power through a unique combination of smart and sharp power. Overall, a comparison of the influence of Russian and EU soft power in Ukraine highlights that the latter proved to be generally more persuasive, leading Moscow to resort to military force.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• Ukraine
• EU
• soft power
• Russkiy Mir
• Greater Europe

Acknowledgements

The article has been developed as part of the project ‘Promoting Order at the Edge of Turbulence (POET)’ that is conducted in the Center for International Studies and Development (CISAD) at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). The Project is co-financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange under the NAWA Guest Professorship programme and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange within the NAWA Chair programme. The author wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of the NAWA Grant (PPN/PRO/2020/1/00003/DEC/1) from the Polish Academic Exchange Council and NCN grant (ZARZADZENIE NCN 94/2020) from the Polish National Science Council.

Notes

1 The comparison of the Russkiy Mir with Huntington’s and Dugin’s notions is merely episodic and anecdotal, since the former represents primarily a cultural concept, which does not inherently imply geopolitical competition.

2 The Uniate Church is the name commonly used to indicate the Churches of Eastern Europe which returned to communion with the Roman Catholic Church between the 15th and 16th centuries. The term ‘uniate’ indicates the ‘union’ with Rome and the Pope.

3 The term ‘Banderite’ refers to Stepan A. Bandera (1909-59), a far-right Ukrainian nationalist who fought for Ukraine's independence from Stalin’s Soviet Union and whose movement, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, carried out anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres during World War II.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paolo Pizzolo

Paolo Pizzolo is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland.