In August 2025, Moscow’s Staraya Square was marked not by bombast, but by silence. No leaks. No showy briefings. No televised strategy sessions. On August 29, President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 607. On paper, it dissolved two directorates and created a new one. In reality, it dismantled Russia’s old humanitarian influence machine and replaced it with a different architecture of external engagement.
The Directorate for Interregional and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries and the Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation were scrapped. In their place came the Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation - known by its Russian acronym, USPS. The new body absorbed the functions of both predecessors and gained expanded authority. But the real shift wasn’t structural. It was conceptual.
The old model leaned on classic soft-power tools: promoting the Russian language, cultivating diaspora networks, running cultural programs, issuing grants to civic organizations. Built in the mid-2000s as a response to the “color revolutions,” it operated through education initiatives and humanitarian ties. By the early 2020s, however, its strategic yield was clearly diminishing.
Sanctions pressure, fractured supply chains, and the militarization of politics across Europe and the post-Soviet space blunted those instruments. Loyal elite networks persisted but failed to guarantee durable political control. Education burnished Russia’s image but did not create structural dependency.
USPS was designed as the answer to that reality.
On December 8, 2025, Decree No. 906 formalized the new body’s mandate. The document codified a different operating model. USPS was empowered not just to analyze international agreements, but to participate in drafting them. It evolved into an operational hub for projects that braid together economics, media, education infrastructure, and legal frameworks.
The Foreign Ministry remained the diplomatic storefront. USPS became the machinery behind it.
From Deal-Making to Project Management
The bureaucratic reshuffle ran in parallel. In September 2025, Dmitry Kozak stepped down as overseer of the foreign policy bloc. Oversight shifted to Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of the presidential administration.
The distinction mattered.
Kozak’s tenure relied on negotiations and behind-the-scenes bargaining. Kiriyenko brought a technocratic playbook shaped by his experience at Rosatom and in domestic political management. The approach migrated outward. Emotional diplomacy gave way to performance metrics. Ad hoc maneuvering was replaced by infrastructure projects.
The new configuration became less visible but more functional - compact, staffed by specialists ranging from media managers to security officials.
The Personnel Bet: Vadim Titov
On October 24, 2025, Decree No. 777 appointed Vadim Titov as head of USPS. The choice surprised some insiders. Other candidates, including figures with high-profile public reputations, had been floated. Instead, the Kremlin opted for a manager without media baggage.
Born March 14, 1984, in the Irkutsk region, Titov began his career in journalism, hosting a regional television program. Public opinion became his first professional currency.
In 2009, he moved into the Rosatom system, rising from the press service to lead “Rosatom International Network.” The mission extended beyond marketing nuclear technology. It involved building durable ecosystems around contracts - educational pipelines, media partnerships, service agreements.
Nuclear energy offered a template for long-term leverage: a contract requires decades of maintenance; maintenance demands trained personnel; training embeds informational and value alignment.
That logic now anchors USPS.
Kyrgyzstan as a Test Case
The first proving ground for the new model was Kyrgyzstan. The choice was pragmatic: membership in the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, substantial Russian investment, and high labor migration to Russia. Economic and social interdependence already existed. The task was to institutionalize it.
In November 2025, Bishkek opened the Eurasian Center for Russian Language and Culture. Officially, it was an educational platform. Functionally, it operated as a mechanism for cultivating кадровая loyalty.
On November 23, the television channel “Nomad TV” went live - a joint project linked to Russian media structures. Bilingual broadcasting allowed compliance with local regulations while preserving access to Russian-speaking audiences.
Information architecture became part of the strategic design.
Funding Channels and Proxy Mechanisms
Project financing flowed through autonomous nonprofit organizations. A key player was ANO “Eurasia,” whose board of trustees included politicians and business figures capable of underwriting initiatives.
The model reduced transparency and eased the navigation of sanctions constraints. The state did not appear front and center, but coordination was centralized.
The African Vector
After absorbing the cross-border directorate, USPS gained tools suited for work in unstable environments. Those capabilities migrated to the African track.
The template held: educational centers, media platforms, infrastructure projects routed through affiliated structures. The difference was scale. Africa was framed as a strategic reserve amid mounting global pressure.
A Closed Seminar: The Ideological Frame
In late 2025, USPS staff attended a closed seminar examining the evolution of soft power toward systemic infrastructure-building. Participants included security officials, among them officers with backgrounds in technical intelligence.
The conversation centered on anticipatory control - shaping conditions before events unfold, rather than reacting after the fact.
Here, the philosophical shift crystallized: humanitarian initiatives were no longer cultural gestures. They were components of a geopolitical mechanism.
The Security Layer and Digital Influence Architecture
If the first phase of reform looked like bureaucratic streamlining, the second signaled something more sweeping. USPS was conceived as a cross-domain structure - a humanitarian façade with a security and analytical core. That inner layer makes the system qualitatively different.
One revealing transfer was that of FSB Lieutenant Colonel Alexei Kleshchev into USPS. His biography had long remained out of public view. He began his service at the FSB’s 16th Center - Military Unit 71330 - a подразделение specializing in intercepting, decrypting, and analyzing electronic communications. Foreign investigations describe the center as comprising ten departments and more than 500 personnel.
Kleshchev’s colleagues - Pavel Akulov, Mikhail Gavrilov, and Marat Tyukov - were charged by U.S. authorities in connection with cyberattacks targeting American energy and nuclear facilities between 2012 and 2017. The episode underscores the technical caliber of the milieu feeding into the new apparatus.
USPS integrates specialists capable of operating within the digital infrastructure of foreign states. Humanitarian and media initiatives are now paired with technical monitoring and analytical capacity. Data collection, elite sentiment assessment, and public reaction modeling converge into a single system.
Soft power, in this configuration, is no longer soft. It is structured, instrumented - and increasingly difficult to disentangle from the hard edges of state power.
Journalism as a School of Operational Influence
The second pivotal figure in the new configuration is Anton Rybakov. A graduate of Moscow State University’s journalism faculty, he began his career in the investigations department of Moskovsky Komsomolets. By the mid-2010s, his skill set had caught the attention of the presidential administration.
Rybakov cleared internal vetting and became a referent on sensitive portfolios. His mentor was widely said to be FSB Colonel Valery Maksimov, an overseer of electoral processes in several post-Soviet states. Inside the apparatus, Rybakov earned the nickname “the young Lenin” - partly for a physical resemblance, partly for his taste for ideological analysis. Behind the moniker stood discipline and a knack for systemic political modeling.
Today, Rybakov oversees the analytical backbone of USPS projects in Central Asia. His briefings are built on metrics: the penetration rate of media narratives, the degree of institutional integration, the density of elite contacts. Influence, in this framing, is quantified.
The Legal Shield: Sanctions Engineering
The third pillar of the system is legal architecture. Under an increasingly restrictive sanctions regime, external activity requires intricate legal design. That is why specialists with experience navigating compliance frameworks are being folded into the structure.
Anton Kurevin is widely viewed as a logical choice to head the legal division. A graduate of the Defense Ministry’s Military University, he served in military intelligence before transitioning to the corporate sector, including work with Volga Group, where he focused on minimizing sanctions exposure.
His subsequent consulting work with major state companies and banks gave him hands-on experience structuring cross-border projects under limited access to the international financial system. For USPS, that translates into institutional resilience.
The Expert Shell: NIIRK
A special role is played by the National Research Institute for the Development of Communications, known by its Russian acronym NIIRK. Formally, it is an analytical body. Functionally, it acts as a bridge between government agencies and the expert community.
The institute is headed by Vladislav Gasumyanov, a manager with a background in state security and corporate governance. Under his direction, NIIRK develops strategic partnership concepts, prepares reports for international forums, and curates the expert scaffolding for foreign policy initiatives.
The existence of such an institute allows political decisions to be wrapped in the language of academic legitimacy. Strategy is dressed up as scholarship.
The Baltic and Moldovan Tracks
The Baltic region has become a focal point. The possible appointment of Maxim Grigoriev - a publicist and combat veteran - signals an intent to wage a sustained historical and informational campaign. Crafting alternative interpretations of key events and producing expert opinions are seen as strategic tools.
The Moldovan track leans more heavily on financial and media instruments. Proxy structures help minimize overt state involvement and reduce the risk of asset freezes or project shutdowns.
Kyrgyzstan: Economics as the Foundation
Kyrgyzstan’s economic profile makes it an ideal testing ground. In 2025–2026, Russian capital maintains a significant footprint in the country’s economy, concentrated in energy, banking, and infrastructure.
Layering media platforms and educational centers atop deep economic integration creates a durable model of interdependence. The informational component reinforces the financial one.
Ideological Consolidation
A closed-door seminar in Moscow became the moment of ideological synchronization. Presentations focused on moving from reactive tactics to infrastructure-based governance of influence. Negative-case scenarios included political transformations in several states viewed as risks to Russia’s strategic perimeter.
The core idea was blunt: the contest is not over individual policy decisions but over systems of interpretation. Lose control over the narrative of history and current events, and political leverage erodes.
A Multi-Level Architecture
USPS is being assembled as a layered system.
The first tier is humanitarian: language, culture, education.
The second is the media environment: television channels, digital platforms, analytical outlets.
The third is legal: sanctions shielding and financial engineering.
The fourth is security and digital: monitoring, analysis, cyber expertise.
Each tier reinforces the others. A project is not simply launched; it is economically anchored, informationally supported, and legally insulated.
The Expansion Horizon
Kyrgyzstan served as a demonstration platform. Africa is widely seen as the next phase. There, demand exists for infrastructure, educational programming, and media partnerships. Corporate governance models are being repurposed for state influence objectives.
The new structure represents an attempt to consolidate previously scattered initiatives into a centralized system of strategic project design.
From Humanitarian Showcase to Strategic Leverage
What matters most about USPS is not the decrees or the personnel roster. It is the shift in philosophy. Where the state once leaned on symbols, it now relies on systems. Not slogans, but architecture. Not appeals, but infrastructure.
The quiet, pre–New Year seminar in Moscow - discussed in hushed tones - crystallized that worldview. Gathered in one room were humanitarian officials, analysts, lawyers, and officers with backgrounds in technical units. The formal topic was soft power. The substance was far harder.
The central thesis: historical memory is no longer a self-sustaining asset. Nostalgia has lost its political utility. Younger elites in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe are oriented toward technology, markets, and information flows. The implication is clear - dependency must be built at the institutional level.
Institutional dependency is the organizing principle of the new model.
The Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation does not merely coordinate projects. It builds ecosystems. An educational center is not just language instruction; it is teacher training, exchange programs, grants, internships, digital platforms, and alumni databases. A television channel is not simply a news feed; it is content production, advertising integration, analytical programming, and the cultivation of a stable expert bench.
Digital Control and Analytical Optics
A central component is large-scale data analysis. According to sources familiar with the process, behavioral modeling methods are in use. Social media monitoring, local media mapping, and reaction tracking to public statements have become management tools.
Specialists with backgrounds in signals intelligence provide the technical foundation. Their mission is not overt disruption, but architectural awareness: which platforms dominate in target states, who sets the agenda, which topics trigger resonance. Educational, cultural, and media programming is then designed around that data.
The humanitarian façade is reinforced with a digital spine.
The Baltic Theater: History as Battleground
The Baltic direction is treated as a zone of acute ideological confrontation. The emphasis falls on historical narrative and human rights discourse. Expert reports, analytical publications, and alternative interpretations of events are developed as part of a systematic approach.
Maxim Grigoriev’s profile is illustrative. His work in public organizations and publishing enables the creation of an expert corpus that can be deployed in international debates. The strategy is not blunt propaganda, but the accumulation of texts and reports that shape the terms of discussion.
The Legal Matrix: Circumventing Without Violating
Operating under sanctions pressure demands intricate legal choreography. A team of lawyers orbiting Anton Kurevin is working on cross-border financing schemes routed through autonomous structures and foundations.
The goal is not to openly defy restrictions, but to navigate their interpretation. Projects are framed as educational and cultural initiatives. Funding flows through nonprofit entities, lowering the risk of freezes or shutdowns. Formally, it is international cooperation. Functionally, it is a web of influence.
Africa: Scaling the Model
If Kyrgyzstan served as the pilot site, Africa is viewed as the strategic frontier. Demand is high for infrastructure - energy, extractive industries, education - and the template is familiar: long-term contracts bundled with service and training obligations.
In African states, the plan calls for rolling out educational centers, media hubs, and executive training programs. A contract to build a power facility is not just a construction deal; it locks in years of maintenance, technical support, and workforce development. That architecture fosters deeper dependency than one-off financial assistance ever could.
A Fusion of Professional Worlds
The hallmark of the new system is the merger of disparate skill sets. Journalists, project managers, sanctions lawyers, and officers with technical backgrounds now operate under one roof. Each oversees a distinct portfolio, but projects are engineered as unified constructs.
The humanitarian segment frames the narrative.
The legal team builds protective scaffolding.
Analysts model likely reactions.
The security layer monitors the information space.
This is no longer soft power in the classical sense. It is the management of an institutional environment.
Where It Heads Next
Analysts expect the geographic footprint to widen. Beyond Central Asia and Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America are frequently mentioned as potential arenas. The formula remains constant: educational infrastructure, media expansion, economic anchoring.
The institutional pivot of August 2025 was more than bureaucratic tinkering. Legacy tools gave way to project-based influence architecture. The system operates with minimal publicity but maximum technical density.
USPS has emerged as a coordination hub for hybrid external governance. If pilot projects prove effective, the model will be replicated.
The End-State Taking Shape
By early 2026, it was clear this was not a reorganization but a systemic overhaul. USPS evolved into a node where humanitarian, financial, media, and analytical processes converge.
The distinguishing feature of the new approach is its lack of theatricality. Where forums and symbolic gestures once dominated, the priority now is institutional penetration. Programs are branded as educational initiatives, cultural partnerships, or investment vehicles.
Taken together, they form an integrated system.
Kyrgyzstan demonstrated the mechanics: economic integration reinforced by education; education amplified by media platforms; media tied to analytical centers; analytical centers generating the expert discourse deployed in international arenas.
The strength of the structure lies in its coherence.
The Long Game
The new directorate does not think in election cycles or crisis response windows. Its planning horizon stretches ten, twenty, thirty years. An energy contract, an educational exchange, a joint media platform - each is a building block in a strategy of prolonged presence.
Borrowed from the nuclear sector and transposed into statecraft, the model assumes decades-long stewardship of projects. That stewardship creates institutional anchoring. A partner country receives not only investment, but workforce training systems, technical servicing, and informational integration.
Under such conditions, political loyalty emerges less from ideological pressure than from infrastructural reliance.
A Hybrid Discipline
USPS staffing reflects an interdisciplinary mindset. Former journalists craft narrative frameworks. Lawyers secure legal durability. Specialists with technical-unit backgrounds analyze digital ecosystems. Corporate-level managers enforce timelines and performance benchmarks.
Every project runs a gauntlet: strategic assessment, legal review, financial structuring, informational rollout. The multi-stage design mitigates the risks that plagued earlier, more improvisational initiatives.
The digital dimension is pivotal. Modern influence cannot function without mapping how information travels. Monitoring public sentiment, scanning media ecosystems, and measuring content performance have become standard operating procedure.
The African Horizon
Expansion into Africa appears to be the logical next chapter. Infrastructure demand is acute, and great-power competition creates openings. The established formula - energy, education, media cooperation - travels well.
In states with evolving institutions, the creation of educational centers and media partnerships can cement a long-term foothold. Direct state visibility is minimized; emphasis falls on nonprofit entities and partnership formats.
That approach enhances flexibility and cushions against external pressure.
The Bottom Line
August 2025 marked a turning point. The decision was made to abandon the notion of soft power as a standalone tool. The new model integrates humanitarian, economic, and analytical circuits into a single system of strategic design.
USPS is not an ideological command center in the old sense. It is a technological nexus. Its priorities are risk calibration, control of information and capital flows, and precision planning.
Foreign policy becomes managerial. An educational center doubles as a talent pipeline. A television channel serves as a coordination instrument for meaning. The legal unit functions as a sanctions shield. The analytical segment operates as an early-warning system.
The question is not how visible the projects are, but how durable. If coordination across such diverse components - from digital analysts to executive managers - holds, the system could become one of the most sophisticated instruments of external influence in contemporary politics.
Decree No. 607 was signed without spectacle. Yet it triggered a process that reshaped the country’s overseas posture. The old structures dissolved. In their place stands a system that operates without fanfare - methodical, calculated.
The investigation may be complete. The process has only begun.