The Rondeli Foundation’s 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 37 covers Russian geostrategy for the month of January 2026. The numbering and contents of the Outcomes, Goals and Objectives follows The Structure of Modern Russia’s Foreign Strategy framework.
Objective 3: Enhancing internal political instability and polarization within Western states
- On 23 January, Slovakia-based cybersecurity researchers said that Russia had likely been behind “a failed cyberattack targeting Poland’s power grid in late December 2025.”
Objective 4: Disrupting Western international alliances
- On 23 January, media outlet Meduza published a material reporting the instructions given by the Kremlin to the Russian state media on how to cover the controversy regarding Greenland. The state media had been told to “present the standoff as evidence of a weakening West, a fractured NATO, and an American president borrowing from Vladimir Putin’s playbook.”
Objective 9: Achieving de-sovereignization of Ukraine
- On 29 January 2026, the Russian foreign minister Lavrov said regarding the possible American and European post-war security guarantees for Ukraine that they would be guarantees for “the very Ukrainian regime that conducts a Russophobic, neo-nazi policy,” and that “if the goal is to keep the regime in some parts of former Ukraine, and keep making this regime an outpost for threatening the Russian Federation, then you can guess yourself that such security guarantees can hardly provide for a stable peace.”
- In the Russo-Ukrainian War, during January 2026, Russians advanced in Hulyaipole, likely completing the capture of the town. The situation in Kupyansk continued to worsen for the Russian troops surrounded within the city.
Objective 16: Entrenching Russian influence in sub-Saharan Africa
- On 14 January, Madagascar‘s ruling regime announced that Russian military personnel had “arrived in Madagascar to train units of the Malagasy Armed Forces in the use of new military equipment supplied by Russia.”
Objective 20: Alignment with China
- A Russian-Chinese joint diplomatic statement issued on 23 January accused the “collective West” of militarizing the “Asia-Pacific region.”
Objective 21: Alignment with Iran
- On 13 January, the Russian foreign ministry expressed Moscow’s support for the regime in Iran against the background of protests and their brutal suppression, calling potential American military strikes against the Iranian regime “categorically unacceptable.”
Objective 20: Alignment with China, Objective 21: Alignment with Iran and Objective 25: Developing partnerships with regional powers in the Southern Hemisphere
- On 9 January, the Russian navy launched week-long joint exercises with the navies of China and Iran, hosted by South Africa in its waters. The drills reportedly were “led by China.”
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