Russian Geostrategy Monitor, Issue 33: September 2025
The Russian Geostrategy Monitor is a monthly brief that tracks Russian geostrategy worldwide employing the framework set in The Structure of Modern Russia’s Foreign Strategy. Russian geostrategic activities are also tracked on the regularly updated interactive Russian Geostrategy Map.
Issue 33 covers the Russian geostrategy for the month of September 2025. The numbering and contents of the Outcomes, Goals and Objectives follows The Structure of Modern Russia’s Foreign Strategy framework.
Objective 2: Strengthening the Western political forces considered by Moscow to be inimical to the Western-led international order, and the Kremlin’s relationships with such forces
- On 16 September, the Romanian prosecutors stated that four companies with “proven links to the Russian Federation” had spread “disinformation and artificial intelligence-generated content in Romania” in an effort to promote the pro-Russian presidential candidate Georgescu in late 2024.
Objective 3: Enhancing internal political instability and polarization within Western states
- On 1 September, Argentina’s security ministry accused Russian residents in the country of “conducting actions to influence the population for Russia’s geopolitical interests,” while the presidential spokesman referred to the Russian involvement in a “disinformation campaign to overthrow the government.”
Objective 7: Achieving instability in the Western Balkans
- On 9 September, Russia engaged in another of its diplomatic efforts to prevent resignation of the pro-secessionist Bosnian Serb leader Dodik, with the Russian foreign minister Lavrov meeting Dodik in Moscow, denouncing the Western attempts to push him aside, and calling him the “elected legitimate President of the Serb Republic.”
Objective 8: Undermining US Foreign Policy in the Western Hemisphere
- On 18 September, Russia denounced “attempted interference and threats of use of force towards Venezuela,” expressing “full support of the efforts by the Maduro government to defend national sovereignty under the conditions of sharply increased external pressure.”
Objective 9: Achieving de-sovereignization of Ukraine
- In the Russo-Ukrainian War, during September 2025, Russians slowly pushed forward at a number of sections of the frontline, with the most significant advances made in the Pokrovsk area, and on the front east of Zaporizhzhya.
Objective 11: Achieving decisive influence over Moldova
- On 15 September, Moldova’s President Sandu stated that “Russia has widened its interference in the Moldovan elections to voters living abroad,” targeting the electorally crucial Moldovan diaspora with its disinformation campaign ahead of the coming parliamentary election.
- On 21-22 September, BBC, Bloomberg and Reuters published materials on the massive Russian plans to subvert the Moldovan legislative elections on 28 September 2025.
- Despite the massive Russian interference in the Moldovan 28 September general elections, the pro-Russian political forces were overwhelming defeated. Pro-Russian politicians’ efforts to launch protests against the electoral outcome failed to produce large protest rallies.
Objective 12: Absorbing Belarus
- On 16 September, pro-Russian Belarusian leader Lukashenko stated that Russia and Belarus had been “rehearsing the launch of Russian tactical nuclear weapons“ deployed in Belarus as part of their joint Zapad-2025 military exercises.
Objective 19: Gaining strategic superiority in the Arctic region
- In early September, Russian officials brought a vehicle to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago “that is ‘almost identical to police cars in Russia’ despite Norway’s criminal code banning ‘the use of foreign marks or designs that pretend to be or easily can be confused with a public authority,’” while a “Russian coal company was “deliberately staging a grey zone situation aimed at provoking reactions and testing how Norwegian authorities will handle the situation.”
Objective 20: Alignment with China
- On 3 September, the chief of Russia’s Rosatom state nuclear corporation said that “Russia will help China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest producer of nuclear power.”
- On 26 September, Washington Post presented new evidence showing that Russia had been helping China in its preparations to invade Taiwan, “using its battlefield experience to give Chinese airborne units the training and technical knowhow to carry out lightning-fast operations.”
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