title: The Kremlin's reverse democracy
abstract: This chapter focuses on Russia’s foreign policy in the three South Caucasian states – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia – since the early 2000s. Recent developments, including the invasion of Ukraine, which is the high point of more assertive foreign policy, help to provide a more accurate analysis of Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy in the Near Abroad that the author have termed the theory of reverse democracy. The US and EU had a rude awakening, however; they still believed that this was the 