Last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told TASS that the West is openly betting on Russia's internal fracture. He pointed to slogans about the "decolonization of Russia" -- which, he claimed, are simply cover for dismembering the state -- and accused Western governments of funding emigre groups working to destabilize the country.
The charge did not come out of nowhere. For several years a network of forums and NGOs in Europe and the United States has openly advocated carving Russia into dozens of independent states. One of them, the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, states as its goal the creation of 41 new countries in place of "one crazy empire," as the organization's website puts it. In November 2024 Russia's Supreme Court designated the forum a terrorist organization; the more moderate Free Russia Forum received the same designation in August 2025.
The idea itself is not new. Similar gatherings have been held in Warsaw, Prague, Tokyo, and Washington since 2022, usually with support from individual members of the European Parliament and American think tanks. But right now, against the backdrop of a negotiating pause on Ukraine and mounting pressure on Iran, the argument that fragmenting hostile states is advantageous is gaining fresh traction in Washington -- this time applied to Tehran.
An old idea, and still a reckless one
Peter Rutland, a professor of global affairs at Wesleyan University, wrote about this as early as 2023 in a column for Responsible Statecraft -- then specifically about Russia. Three years later, he notes, the same logic has resurfaced inside the Trump administration, now directed at Iran. His view has not changed: the notion that the collapse of a hostile state will somehow benefit the United States remains "absolute folly" -- whether applied to Russia or now to Iran.
The real problem, according to most of the experts consulted, is not the moral judgment of the idea but its practical consequences for European and global security. Suzanne Wengle, a professor at Uppsala University's Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, warns that a fragmented Russian Federation would confront Europe with enormous risks in the short and medium term. The greatest of these is civil war and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. At best, it would lower the cost of violence and make weapons more available; at worst, it would lead to their use.
American political scientist Richard Arnold, a professor specializing in international relations, makes a similar point: possible fragmentation of the Russian Federation would be an extremely difficult scenario for European security. The collapse of state borders has historically almost always been accompanied by violence; if it happened to Russia, pressure for more active European involvement would rise sharply.
Why "after the conflict" is not the same as "now"
A separate question is whether a stable European security architecture can be built at all without restoring dialogue with Moscow once fighting in Ukraine stops. Rutland draws a distinction between political and institutional dialogue and warns that the very phrase "after the conflict ends" is misleading. Russia, he explains, sees itself engaged in a civilizational confrontation with "the West" as such. Even a ceasefire or a frozen conflict in Ukraine is therefore unlikely to be viewed in Moscow as the end of a broader contest.
Restoring diplomatic and, to some extent, political contacts will be necessary in any case -- at least to negotiate urgent security issues. But Rutland is far more cautious about full-scale "institutional" rapprochement -- social, economic, and political. As long as an authoritarian government is harshly suppressing dissent, he argues, such rapprochement is impossible. Security will have to be built in opposition to this regime, not in cooperation with it.
Knowledge instead of slogans
If policy principles are to be formulated for the years ahead, Rutland insists on one point: European universities and policy circles must rely on knowledge rather than slogans. Intelligence and defense agencies have the resources -- governments have invested in them for years. The production of historical, political, and cultural knowledge about Russia and the post-Soviet space, by contrast, is funded far more poorly, even though it is the universities that supply the talent for those same intelligence services.
What's really behind the headlines
Two things need to be kept separate. The official position of Washington and most European capitals does not treat the breakup of Russia as a policy goal. That position is held mainly by individual lawmakers, NGOs, and emigre networks that are not always coordinating with one another. This distinction is frequently blurred -- both by Russian propaganda, which portrays marginal forums as a consolidated Western strategy, and by the organizers of the forums themselves, who exaggerate their own influence on Western governments.
Lavrov's statement should be read with both tendencies in mind. But the simple fact that the idea of "managed fragmentation" of a hostile state keeps resurfacing in expert and political circles -- first applied to Russia, now to Iran -- shows the staying power of a strategy that professional historians and regional specialists have for years called not a solution but a source of new conflicts. Iraq, Libya, and Sudan are not abstract examples; they are concrete countries where the bet on the collapse of centralized power produced decades of instability. The lesson, it seems, has to be relearned every time.
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