You may not have heard of Yevgeny Primakov. . .
But he's the man who set modern Russia’s political course, and he deserves to be studied more carefully in the wider world. Here's what you need to know.
In Moscow’s corridors of power, Primakov's ghost still walks the carpets and shapes how Russia deals with Washington today. The current talks with the US (from the high profile Alaska summit of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to quieter backroom discussions) are deliberately structured to avoid chatter about resets or grand bargains. What the Kremlin wants right now is time, leverage, and as many options as possible. It’s playing the long game in a way Primakov would very clearly recognize, using strategic independence and multi-vector diplomacy.
Back in the 1990s, when Yeltsin was clinking glasses with Bill Clinton in Washington and exhorting 'God Bless America' at Congress, Primakov stood apart. He refused to be seduced by talk of “partnership” and instead saw a unipolar world for what it was; a table where Russia would be asked to sit quietly as a junior lapdog to the West. His answer was the concept of multipolarity, which would balance power blocs: the core idea was to court many foreign states and submit to none of them.
At the heart of his creed was avoiding binary traps; keeping sovereignty intact; building bridges and rejecting ideology, instead focusing only on what the Kremlin regards as the national interest.
It should sound familiar. Because it’s the essence of Russian diplomacy today. Look at the posture from Anchorage: you don't see Moscow pleading for relief, but I'd also not laying down ultimatums. On the contrary, It’s practicing something akin to strategic procrastination: attempting to wait out unpopular neoliberal Western governments (look at polling numbers in France and the UK, for example), probing the opposing bloc's unity, and keeping the doors open to the normalization of relations.
Meanwhile it continues to deepen ties with China, but hedges its bets with India, and cultivates the Global South while always being careful not to bind itself into any hard alliances. So it avoids falling into junior partner status to a larger power and makes sure not get lodged in any fixed ideological camp like in the Soviet-era. This is pure Primakov.
Even the shape of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) echo his advice. The posture is not anti-Western, but rather post-Western. It's all about nurturing global frameworks that make the West optional, instead of the central player as it was before.
This stands in contrast to other Russian dreamers and their notions, such as Vladislav Surkov’s “Great North” and Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Common European Home;” both visions of integration with Western Europe that collapsed. Primakov saw the futility of these kind of projects long before they ran out of gas.
So today’s maneuvers can't be defined as some form of improvisation, rather they’re a strategy marinated over decades. They mean Russia won’t trade its security redlines in Eastern Europe for sanctions relief or line up obediently in any future US-China showdown.
That’s Primakov’s legacy: basically defined as cautious, multi-directional, and deliberately independent. As Trump's Washington pushes for deals, it finds itself facing not the Russia of the 1990s, but a Russia schooled by the memory of what Russia saw as that horrible and humiliating decade. Today's Moscow is determined never to play the supplicant again. One bitten, twice shy.
Until the United States and Europe "get this" and see this for what it is, they will never grasp why things are not going their way.
