ABSTRACT
As tens of thousands of people gathered in December 2011 in Russia to protest against the results of the elections, it was revealed that Vladimir Putin could no longer rally the support of the majority of the Russian population around a political system centred on the idea of stability and order, as it is increasingly seen as an oppressive personal rule by others. This has been the major failure of Putin’s Russia, but hardly the only one. Despite its increasingly assertive foreign policy, Putin’s Russia has had great difficulties in launching real rather than declaratory integration in the post-Soviet space and dealing with what all the Russian rulers consider to be ‘not only neighbours, but a brotherly people’, 2 Ukraine.
