Fragmented Authority: External Russian Influence and the Domestic Limits of Post-Soviet States in EU Environmental and Energy Security Commitments

Why exactly do states that formally commit to international institution frameworks somehow still fail to fully implement them, even when the incentives for compliance appear strong and highly beneficial? This thesis addresses this exact question through the examination of post- Soviet states' alignment with the European Union's (EU) environmental and energy governance frameworks. Much of the existing scholarship, attributes variation in implementation primarily to domestic factors such as weak institutional capacity, corruption, or just overall insufficient political will. However, the issue with such explanations is that they implicitly assume consolidated sovereignty and internally bounded political systems. This thesis advances an alternative explanation centered on externally embedded structural and systemic constraints. It argues that Russian-instigated territorial fragmentation and asymmetric economic dependence reshape domestic political incentive systems in ways that systematically constrain reform implementation. Through the concept of embedded fragmentation which I present as a phenomenon throughout, where the study illustrates how factors such as unresolved territorial conflicts, inherited infrastructural dependencies, and institutionalized geopolitical linkages become integrated into domestic governance systems, producing durable constraints on legislative action. Drawing on a comparative case study of Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia, and employing legislative process tracing, the thesis shows that Russian influence operates not primarily through direct coercion or preference transformation, but through the restructuring of domestic political environments. This restructuring generates coalition instability, legislative delay and dilution, and agenda distortion, especially in sectors where EU alignment intersects with energy infrastructure and geopolitical exposure. 3 By integrating geopolitical analysis with domestic institutional theory, this thesis challenges dominant Europeanization frameworks and advances broader debates on sovereignty, institutional competition, and energy geopolitics (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier 2005). It further argues against the conventional assumption that Russia's post-Soviet decline entailed a loss of structural influence, demonstrating instead that influence has been reconstituted through indirect and embedded mechanisms.