Farewell of Slavianka: Ukraine and the debacle of Russian soft power

The war in Ukraine manifested Russia’s incapacity to implement a foreign policy strategy without resorting to hard power means, unveiling its soft power weaknesses and limits in the capacity to "attract" and "persuade". Specifically, Russian soft power in Ukraine built around the concept of the "Russian world" (Russkiy Mir) did not prove to bear the sufficient thrust to accost Kyiv to Moscow through peaceable means. At the same time, EU-inspired soft power based on the idea of a "Greater Europe" and Ukrainian "Europeanness" conceived through the normative prism of liberal-democratic values and the chances of higher levels of economic development has downsized the impact of Russian soft power in Ukraine. This article attempts at showing that Russian soft power in Ukraine was never robust enough to accomplish Moscow’s foreign policy agenda, and that after 2022 in the occupied regions it could only be imposed coercively, as an ancillary tool of hard power through an atypical combination of smart power and sharp power. While comparing the impact of Russian and EU soft power in Ukraine, the article detects that EU soft power narrative proved to be generally more persuading, obliging Moscow to resort to military force to pursue its antithetical interests.