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The article focuses on the priorities of Russian foreign policy in relation to the Middle East, North Africa, and, above all, Russia’s Eastern European neighbors, after a significant reduction in the activity of the United States in the Middle East. The main research material is the official statements of the top-level Russian decision-makers. It is assumed that the priorities can be examined after analyzing the determination of states to sacrifice a certain group of benefits for more significant gains in the long-term and axiological perspective. The official Russian narrative since President Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 has been characterized by increasing criticism of the US and its allies, especially in view of the destabilization of the situation in the Maghreb, Syria and Afghanistan. What Russia proposes instead is to stop promoting political patterns that are alien to the region and to start pragmatic cooperation. Its obsessive goal is to build a multipolar world that respects zones of influence. The annexation of Crimea and further steps towards assertiveness towards Belarus and Ukraine, whichcould be observed verbally, became the motivation for sanctions by NATO countries. However, according to its narrative, Russia does not trade with its sovereignty, and the economic activity of the state and the oligarchs rather focused on moderating the effects of the sanctions that the Kremlin was and still is ready to take into account in the long-term perspective with the hope to reunite the socalled Russian World and keep an eye on the ‘near abroad’. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian narrative only became sharper, without departing from its fundamental assumptions. In addition to the obsession with multipolarism, the imperative of defending the Russian population in eternally Russian territories sounded even clearer. Despite the obvious aggression in real behavior, the Kremlin’s verbal propaganda portrays Western policy as the source of international problems and makes it responsible for the outbreak of war. This may indicate the validity of Mearsheimer’s thesis that the presence of Russia’s closest neighbors in the European Union, and even more so in NATO, is perceived in Moscow as an existential threat.

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The members of the Hamburg Circle: W. Stapel (the leading figure), H. Bogner, A.E. Günther, G. Günther, are usually attributed to the ‘young conservative’ trend of the conservative revolution in the Weimar Republic. The main platform of their expression was the Deutsches Volkstum, a monthly published in Hamburg between 1898 and 1938. The activists of the circle opposed the realities of the Weimar Republic, negating the foundations of a democratic and liberal society as it did not express the ‘national will’ of Germans. Their ideal was not exactly in the revival of monarchy but they proposed a national state which was supposed to promote the traditionally structured society. In the area of religious policy, Stapel and his colleagues aimed at a non-secular state with a form of traditionalistic church life in spite of the religious diversity in Germany. Christianity was not perceived from a purely spiritual perspective, but as a doctrine that should be a strong pillar of the state. The Hamburg Circle claimed that to achieve these goals Germans ought to reject liberalism and pacifism, which appeared to be a dangerous consequence of the ideological pressure from assimilated Jewry.

Neo-Eurasianism as a political doctrine is a descendant of the Eurasianist thought in the interwar period and L.N. Gumilev’s ethnological speculations during the Soviet era. Similarly to the oldest generation, Neo-Eurasianists, respond to the trauma of the lost empire in their thought: denying the leading position of the victorious competitor, they also deny the Western understanding of human rights. The polemic is conducted by a group of Russian visionaries, such as A. Panarin, A. Dugin, V. Korovin, as well as by much more pragmatic Kazakh theoreticians of law led by Z. Busurmanov. The Neo-Eurasianist narrative generally rejects the Lockean absolutization of inalienable individual’s rights and emphasizes the communitarian aspect instead. Russian Neo-Eurasianists blame the Western ideologists for treating human rights as a diplomatic weapon against foreign independent powers and try to present the liberal concept as a speculative idea. However, contrary to the Russian tradition, the idea of individual rights is not rejected in the Kazakh legal theory; it is presented in the light of a necessity to protect the right to cultivate one’s identity in the realities of a multiethnic state.

Russian geopolitical thought after the collapse of the USSR can be classified in different ways. However, it always remains under the influence of the same conditions (the trauma of a historical downfall) and proposes clear indications for the foreign policy of the state. The article presents a preliminary view of some directions in Russian geopolitical thought from the point of view of their origin. The study focuses on seven trends: the visions of Great Russia in a multipolar world order, Neo-Eurasianism, the insular theory, military geopolitics, the thought of political geographers, the geopolitics of the Russian World doctrine with its varieties in the form of information geopolitics and cyber- geopolitics, and, last but not least, geoeconomics. A typological study of contemporary Russian geopolitical thought reveals two developmental tendencies: one aiming at radical and ideological concepts and the other proposing a semi-scientific approach.

Buffer territories in Polish‑Russian relations: the case of Belarus The notion of buffer territories is understood as referring either to buffer zones (whose status is usually reflected in international documents) or to states and semi‑state subjects existing between bigger and usually antagonistic powers. Belarus has sometimes been described as a buffer country both in its pre‑sovereign version and after 1991. In several moments of Belarusian history, especially after 1918, neighboring powers tended to treat the area as a part of a bigger creation: either as a part of Russia (Soviet Russia and Germany) or as a segment of Bigger Lithuania (Poland and Lithuania). Those speculations, based on false geopolitical perceptions, turned out to be a mistake in all cases. The failure of the Belarusian People’s Republic led to the unnatural division of the nation, which resulted not only in the miserable conditions it had to overcome but in strengthening the area of potential conflict between powers as well. Today’s Republic of Belarus despite its semi‑authoritarian system and connections with the Russian Federation within the Eurasian structures provides a good example of a state which gradually works out its independent position in international relations.