In 2003, after the Georgian President Eduard Shevarnadze tried to legitimize electoral fraud in order to prolong his power, a united opposition movement headed by the young lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili initiated public protests against the corrupt regime and removed the old political elite from power. Saakashvili supporters, representatives of the civil society and opposition parties, flooded central squares of the Georgian capital bringing hundreds of roses. Those flowers were just the first signs of serious changes that were to come in the post-Soviet space. One year later, in November 2004, thousands of Ukrainian citizens, wearing headscarves and bandages of orange color and freezing for several weeks in the tents at the central Independence square of Kiev, actually asserted the right to choose their president. Both explosions of public protests brought to power new democratic leaderships that assumed office soon after that. Thousands of people present at the inauguration of both Presidents could not check their tears. Later on, in late March 2005 the leaders of the organized public protests in the capital of the formerly Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan seized power ousting from the office President Akayev with little resistance from his side. The analysis of the repercussions of these internal developments for the regional system of international relations should be started from the definition of the major factors and processes, which shaped the post-soviet space architecture in the past decade. The first among these is the process of state and nation-building in the Newly Independent States. New political elites in the former Soviet states had a certain vision of their state-projects which, as a rule, harbored Euro-Atlantic aspirations and, in fact, removed relations with Russia as well cooperation in the post-Soviet space from the list of priorities in their foreign policy agendas. Second, these aspirations, along with the changes in Europe and its periphery, resulted in the involvement of outside players in the post-soviet region - US, NATO, EU and the Western European states, and, some regional actors, i.e. Turkey, China, Poland, etc. The third actor in the post-Soviet space remains Russia, which was considerably irritated by the emergence by the aforementioned (f)actors in its Near Abroad, since Moscow had its own quite different vision for the development of this space. However, despite those three (f)actors worked in diametrically opposite directions and their relations were rather frequently complicated, this interaction did not produce serious tensions in the formerly Soviet space, which could shake the regional system of international relations. As a result, 14 years after the collapse of the USSR, the regional international system still could not find its stable equilibrium. It rather found itself in the situation of unstable equilibrium which could not last for ever.

Nowadays, many geopoliticians underline the fact that Russia has become a great power, with great resources and a great role in the international relations. It is a revival of old imperial supremacy, a revival of super-ethnos and what Lev Gumiliov named, “passionarity”. Stanislav Secrieru proposes a new vision of post-sovietic Russia, using the concept of “strategic identity”. The strategic identity is a way of geopolitical representations about Russia, the construction of Russia’s cognitive map; it may be seen as a way of the restoration of Russia’s internal and external supremacy, as Stanislav Secrieru says. In this way, Putin tried to monopolize the decisional processes and to stress the importance of geo-economical aspects in Russia’s relations with the West. Euro-Atlantic integration of ex-soviet countries from the eastern border of the European Union depends on the relations between Russia and the West, the Russia’s influence upon them and depends on their internal stability. But the eastern border of European Union seems “to suffer” from geopolitical instability. The ex-soviet countries (Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia) have still many problems related to economic, political and decisional instability. The geopolitical picture in this area is still unclear and vague.

Has the development of post-Soviet Russia in an international system dominated by a democracy promoting United States bred an authoritarian reaction in Russia as a response to perceived threats from the West? Beginning with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Russian elites have increasingly seen the United States as a distinctively threatening power, one with a strategy to exploit civic organizations , ethnic groups, and other forms of domestic pluralism as " fifth columns " in an effort to overthrow unfriendly regimes. With each new crisis in U.S.-Russian relations–Ukraine 2004, Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014–the Russian leadership has tightened controls over society, the press, and the state. The result is that the United States' muscular promotion of democracy abroad has produced the opposite of its intended effect on Russia, leading successive Russian governments to balance the perceived threat from the United States by pursuing greater military and intelligence capacity to intervene abroad, and by tightening internal authoritarian controls at home to prevent foreign exploitation of the nascent internal pluralism that emerged in the wake of Communism.