ABSTRACT
Geopolitics, persistently demonised during the days of the Soviet Union, has returned with a vengeance to haunt post-Soviet Russia. Gone are the denunciations of geopolitics as a pseudo-science, nothing more than a heinous capitalist ideological device to promote both militarism and chauvinism among the masses. Further afield the geostrategic horizon continued to darken, increasing Russian vulnerabilities and complicating security requirements. Russia faced the emergence of a novel security environment, former union republics of the Soviet Union to the west, southwest and south, recognised as foreign countries in their own right. In the western strategic theatre NATO proposed expansion eastwards, accompanied by sustained Russian protest and vigorous objection, exposed a deepening geostrategic fissure between Russia and the West. Similarly the idea of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) acting as a 'security agency' for Europe, or for a wider 'military-political association' stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, was still-born.
