Why Russia Escalated Militarily After the USSR: Power, Territory, Alliances, and Regime Risk

This paper analyses Russia's military behaviour in the post-Soviet space from 1992 to 2010 and empirically tests what international and domestic factors drove decisions to escalate.

🔎 What This Paper Asks

Which international and state-level conditions help explain when and why Russia resorted to military escalation during the post-Cold War period (1992–2010)?

📚 How the Cases Were Examined (1992–2010)

• Combines the dyad analysis framework introduced by Stuart Bremer (1992) with unit-level variables typical of foreign policy analysis.
• Empirically tests a set of hypotheses about determinants of Russian military behaviour in the post-Cold War era.
• Uses both bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses to estimate the separate and joint impacts of independent variables.

🧩 Factors Tested

• International variables: relative power, presence of military alliance pacts, territorial salience of the dispute.
• State-level variables: degree of democracy versus autocracy, and regime vulnerability.

🔬 Analytical Strategy

The design integrates dyad-level comparison (pairwise interactions between Russia and opponent states) with unit-level attributes of Russia's regime and policy context. Bivariate models probe individual relationships; multivariate models assess how international and domestic factors interact to produce escalation decisions.

⚖️ Why It Matters

Clarifies how changes in power, alliances, territorial stakes, and regime characteristics jointly shaped Russia's use of force after the Soviet collapse. The approach bridges international-relations dyad methods and foreign-policy unit-level analysis to inform debates on escalation, alliance politics, and regime effects in conflict behavior.