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Renaud Girard
Renaud Girard is Chief Foreign Correspondent at Le Figaro. An advocate of political realism, he studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. He has worked as a war correspondent and written books about the Middle East, geopolitics and international relations.
It is by no means certain that Russia's massive bombardment of Ukraine on the night of September 27th to 28th, 2025 – an aerial invasion of some 600 drones – will have advanced the Kremlin's military affairs in the slightest. It is an instrument of Vladimir Putin's war of attrition, aimed at undermining the morale of the neighbouring country's population. It does not seem to be working. The vast majority of Ukrainians refuse to give up their freedom and independence; they retain their confidence in President Zelensky. Goering's blitz against London in the autumn of 1940 also had a counterproductive effect, uniting the British around Churchill.
Outside their borders, the Russian armed forces are making very slow progress. Inside, they are unable to prevent Ukrainian drones from destroying, one by one, Russian energy facilities – refineries as well as pipeline pumping stations. In the Black Sea, Russian ships have had to leave Sevastopol for refuge in Abkhazia, so fearful are they of Ukrainian naval drones. In short, Putin's Russia seems far removed from its dream of conquering Odessa, in order to transform Ukraine into a landlocked rump state without access to the sea.
In political, and no longer just military, matters, the decline of Russian influence beyond its European borders is even more striking.
To the north, the Baltic Sea has become a NATO lake, following the joining of Sweden and Finland to the Atlantic Alliance.
By agreeing to preposition forces in the Baltic states, their allies, the major European powers of NATO – France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy – have begun to build a conventional deterrent on the borders of the Russian Empire.
To the south, Moldova has just confirmed, in a vote, its desire to turn to Brussels rather than Moscow (on which this former Soviet socialist republic, which speaks Romanian, was a dependent from 1945 to 1991). In the legislative elections held on September 28, 2025, President Maia Sandu's pro-European Truth and Dare party exceeded 50% of the vote, both in seats and votes. The pro-Russian Patriotic Bloc party came in second, with only 25% of the vote. Like Ukraine, Moldova has obtained official candidate status from Brussels for membership in the European Union.
Independent Moldova, a small country of 33,000 km2 and 2,400,000 inhabitants, has long had a significant portion of its population nostalgic for the Soviet Union, so chaotic was the transition to a liberal economy from 1992 onwards. This is particularly the case in Transnistria, the narrow strip of land east of the Dniester River, where ethnic Russians and Cossacks are numerous, where the Russian army has maintained cantonments, and which has lived in administrative autonomy since the short civil war of June 1992.
There were also a significant number of pro-Russians on the other side of the river (in the region formerly called Bessarabia), but the violence of Russian aggression against Ukraine, Moldova's neighbour, has changed their minds.
Is Moldova at risk of being swallowed up by the Russian ogre soon? No. Because its good fortune lies in being geographically landlocked between Ukraine and Romania, and in not having a direct border with Russia. As for the Russian military stationed in Transnistria, they are too few in number to launch an offensive aimed at crossing the wide Dniester River. Legally, Moldova is more exposed to the ogre than the Baltic states, as it is not a member of NATO or the EU. But geographically, it is less so. As long as the Ukrainians hold out against the Russians, Moldova is not in danger.
The recent Moldovan vote makes us realize the immensity of Putin's mistake in choosing, in February 2022, hard power over soft power, to borrow the distinction of the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who died last spring.
If the Russian president had not sought to physically twist the arms of his neighbours, former Soviet republics, members of the USSR, like Russia, if he had simply traded with them, he would today enjoy a hundred times greater influence on the banks of the Dnieper, the Dniester, and even the Danube.
Is Putin an old-fashioned geopolitician, uninterested in the economy and indifferent to the happiness of his people? Are his role models Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, more than Alexander II? Are power and territorial conquest synonymous for him? Does he believe it is always better to be feared than to be happy? It's very difficult to say, as he is so secretive.
But if we assess his political performance today compared to the summer of 2021, we see that he has weakened Russia more in the world than he has strengthened it. On August 20, 2021, Angela Merkel, who was preparing to leave the Chancellery in Berlin after sixteen years in power, made a point of traveling to Moscow to pay Putin a final respect. Two months earlier, US President Biden had met with him in Geneva, going so far as to withdraw his veto on the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 project, a pipeline directly linking Russian territory to German territory.
This was a time when Russia was still respected in Europe, when it was doing very lucrative business there, when it hadn't had to throw itself into the arms of the Chinese.
When a country starts a war and proves incapable of winning, its influence in the world always suffers a considerable decline.
This article was first published in the International column in Le Figaro, Tuesday, September 30, 2025.