Since the mid-2000s Russia has been politically de-Europeanising. Putin's choice to step down from the presidency in favour of Medvedev in 2008 was justified in the state media as: "We are not in Central Asia." His return nullifies this claim, placing him firmly alongside Nursultan Nazarbayev, president-for-life of Kazakhstan, and other Asian strongmen. Like the general secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Putin will now almost certainly either die in office or be removed unconstitutionally. The FSB and other security agencies, with their involvement in property, corruption and crime, bear more resemblance to an Arab "Mukhabarat" than to MI5 or the FBI. The economic structure of Russia has also been de-Europeanised: following the pattern of Middle Eastern petro-states, it is more dependent on natural resources than the USSR ever was. 

Under Putin, Russia has become more Asian in a demographic sense too. Most of the Jews and the ethnic Germans emigrated in the 1990s, to be replaced by 10-15 million mostly Muslim Central Asians and Caucasians in the 2000s. Ethnic Russians today make up less than three-quarters of the population once this migration is accounted for. 

Abroad, it is a similar picture. China is now Russia's largest trading partner, surpassing Germany for the first time in 2010. Yoked together in the new BRICS forum and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the authoritarian powers have built international organisations without the West. Chinese troops carry out exercises on Russian soil, while Moscow supplies the People's Liberation Army with the technology to put a man in space, build a stealth bomber and launch an aircraft carrier. China has replaced Russia as the biggest trading partner of all but one Central Asian state and extends credit lines as far away as Belarus, Armenia and Moldova. Regionally, the SCO is the only successful international organisation as it is unofficially led by Beijing.