Greater Eurasia in the New Cold War: Challenge or Opportunity?

The Greater Eurasian Partnership project, put forward back in 2016, has become one of Russia's key initiatives to build its version of a broad regionalism covering a significant part of the continent. The launch of the Special Military Operation and the deepening of the Russian-Western confrontation has created and continues to create huge structural changes in the global and regional international system. It also brings serious adjustments to Russia's foreign policy, its objective capabilities and subjective perception of its initiatives. The aim of this study is to determine the prospects of the Greater Eurasia concept under the changing geopolitical conditions of 2016-2022. It provides a brief overview of the conditions in which Eurasian regionalism developed during the period under review; traces the development of the Greater Eurasia concept in Russian official and expert discourse, shows how the ideological content of the initiative developed, how the initially widely interpreted concept crystallised; considers the achievements in the implementation of the concept, among which the most prominent is the "narrative expansion" on various international platforms, including not only within the framework of the EAEU promoted by Russia, but also within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union. In order to fulfil the objectives of this study, the authors relied on the analysis of statements of public figures of the Russian Federation and other states at international events and publicist literature, analytical articles in scientific journals and press, official documents and statements of international organisations. The main conclusion of the study is the ambiguity of the situation in which the concept of Greater Eurasia has found itself under conditions of increasing geopolitical confrontation and the relatively modest results of its implementation in recent years. At the same time, one cannot help but notice that the increasingly complex conditions can be an incentive for the evolution and concretisation of the concept, as well as the adaptation of the foreign policy leadership's approach to its implementation. Thus, we can say that despite the difficult conditions, the concept can still claim to be a great future.

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