Moscow: Vladimir Putin has quietly pulled the plug on the Kremlin’s Office for Interregional and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries-a bureaucratic arm set up back in 2005 to push Russian influence across the post-Soviet neighborhood. In its place, he’s ordered the creation of a new Office for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation. On paper, the move is billed as nothing more than ‘administrative optimization.’ In reality, it looks like a tacit admission that Moscow’s two-decade experiment in soft power has gone bust. For years, the Kremlin tried to win hearts and minds in the former Soviet republics through cultural outreach, clandestine political patronage, and lavish funding. Instead, it ended up with dwindling leverage and vanishing trust.
According to Trend News Agency, the idea for a dedicated Kremlin shop to handle the ‘near abroad’ was born out of panic. The early 2000s brought a wave of ‘color revolutions’ that rattled Moscow’s hold over its backyard. In 2003, Georgia saw the Rose Revolution. By late 2004, Ukraine was in the throes of the Orange Revolution. Both uprisings put pro-Western leaders in power, and in the Kremlin’s eyes, threatened to spread like wildfire.
Putin feared that a democratic tide could roll right up to Russia’s borders-and weaken Moscow’s clout in neighboring capitals. By the spring of 2005, a new presidential office was set up with a mission: stop any more velvet revolutions and make sure pro-Russian politicians held onto power in the post-Soviet space.
The scope was sweeping-Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Central Asia, the Baltics, even the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Officially, this was a soft-power project: cultural programs, elite networking, nurturing pro-Russian parties and NGOs. But the reality veered sharply from the script.
The office’s first boss was Modest Kolerov, a Kremlin political strategist known for his hardline nationalism. He pushed aggressive integration under Moscow’s umbrella, and his blunt style quickly became a liability. Kolerov made headlines with fiery statements and heavy-handed tactics that grated on neighboring governments. Within two years he was quietly shown the door, with officials blaming his ‘excessive radicalism.’
From then on, the office became the turf of career intelligence officers. In 2007, it was handed to Nikolai Tsvetkov, a veteran of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. In the 1990s, Tsvetkov had posed as a journalist in Japan-working at Komsomolskaya Pravda while freelancing for Yomiuri Shimbun-but his real job was espionage. His stint at the Kremlin didn’t last long.
By 2009, the reins passed to Sergey Vinokurov, a colonel in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence. Vinokurov was known as Moscow’s fixer for the toughest assignments: unrecognized republics, unstable regions, places where Russian leverage was decisive. But his tenure coincided with humiliating setbacks.
In South Ossetia’s 2011 presidential race, the Kremlin’s handpicked candidate lost to opposition leader Alla Dzhioyeva, triggering protests and a court battle that annulled the vote. Around the same time, in Transnistria, Moscow threw its weight behind another favorite-only to watch him lose to Yevgeny Shevchuk, who wasn’t considered a Kremlin loyalist.
For Moscow, these defeats were more than local embarrassments. They were strategic faceplants. Russian media later reported that Vinokurov was yanked from his post over the failures and shunted back to the SVR, where he was quietly parked in a deputy director role-a soft landing that looked a lot like forced retirement.
In 2012, the job went to Vladimir Chernov, a major general in the SVR and a consummate insider. Chernov had deep ties to Sergei Ivanov, a former defense minister and once one of Putin’s closest confidants. The two had bonded back in the 1980s, when Chernov was a young operative in London, officially working for the International Grains Council before being moved to Finland under diplomatic cover.
Under Chernov, the office became a de facto extension of Russia’s intelligence network. It served as a convenient umbrella for covert operations across the post-Soviet space, while Chernov himself stuck to a familiar playbook in public: railing against ‘Western-backed color revolutions,’ denouncing U.S. and NATO interference, and urging neighbors to stick close to Moscow.
One of the Kremlin office’s core missions was to shape the domestic politics of its neighbors. For that, it built a dedicated planning department, headed by retired KGB-FSB officer Colonel Valery Maksimov. Maksimov became the point man for Moscow’s interference in foreign elections. His team’s job was simple: identify pro-Russian candidates, design their campaigns, feed them resources and political consultants, and manage the narrative through pliant pundits and ‘experts’ who would tilt public opinion in Moscow’s favor.
Other clandestine projects fell flat too. In the Baltics, the Kremlin tried to build a shadow media network of ‘independent’ journalists and bloggers parroting Russian narratives. That portfolio was managed by Colonel Yevgeny Umerenkov, another spy who once masqueraded as a reporter in the U.S. and Mexico. Later he shifted focus to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, cultivating ties with Russian-language outlets and community leaders.
If there was one place the Kremlin banked heavily on, it was Moldova. With a sizable Russian-speaking minority and the breakaway enclave of Transnistria, the country was considered fertile ground for Moscow’s influence machine. Colonel Igor Maslov, an SVR officer with Balkan experience, was tapped to run the ‘Moldova desk.’ His team churned out exhaustive dossiers on Moldovan politicians and security officials, rating them by loyalty and usefulness to Moscow.
Moscow had carved out handlers for nearly every neighbor. In Azerbaijan, oversight fell to military intelligence officer Valery Chernyshov, who compiled dossiers on the country’s political and military elite. These files could serve as leverage-either for recruitment or blackmail.
Officially, the now-defunct Kremlin office was tasked with culture, education, youth programs, and NGO work-the building blocks of a ‘positive image’ of Russia. In theory, this was Moscow’s soft power arm. In practice, it became a Potemkin project: endless reports, staged events, bloated budgets, and the kind of showmanship that fooled no one.
By early 2021, the office itself was engulfed in scandal. A massive leak of internal documents-including correspondence and analytical reports on CIS countries-blew the lid off its operations. Dubbed the ‘Chernov Archive,’ the trove was passed to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center and then to outlets like RISE Moldova and The Insider.
The final act came in August 2025. With one sweeping decree, Putin abolished both the Office for Interregional and Cultural Ties and its twin, the Office for Border Cooperation. In their place, the Kremlin announced a new structure: the Office for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation. The new unit will be overseen not by Kozak, but by Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s powerful first deputy chief of staff.
The closure of the old office marks the symbolic end of an era in Russian foreign policy-an era when Moscow believed it could micromanage its neighbors from the shadows by funding loyalists and squeezing dissenters. That world is gone. The new reality is one in which respect can’t be bought-not for millions, not for billions. Whether the Kremlin can accept that truth will determine the future of Russia’s place in its own neighborhood.