Zugzwang

In such a position his condition will get worse step by step until he is forced, by the necessity of making a move, to relax his hold on, or weaken, some key point, and his game collapses. A combination directed to bring about such a catastrophe is called by the Germans Zugzwang (compulsion to move), and the player who succumbs under it is said to have got into Zugzwang.

An explanation for this phenomenon may be that speech acts that include instructions (e.g., a command or request) show a higher level of activity than speech acts of assertion; the ethnomethodological analysis of conversation speaks of conversational Zugzwänge:²⁴ a request, a question or a command demands a reaction of the addressee.

Here, too, it is Russia that, ironically, is in Zugzwang. Because the central rationale of Moscow's occupation of Crimea was the defense of supposedly threatened Russians, Putin and his minions must continue insisting that Ukraine's Russians are under threat and that their right are being systematically violated.

not only is there a lack of good alternatives concerning some particular policy decisions, but the whole Russian system is moving towards a zugzwang.

"In chess terms, Putin is not in a stalemate, he's in a zugzwang: He is forced to make further moves even if they worsen his position, precisely because he must keep selling his 'war of civilizations' concept to Russians," Leonid Bershidsky, the self-exiled Russian political analyst wrote in Bloomberg recently.

Perhaps the Soviet Union under Gromyko could have persuaded him against attacking Kuwait, which as we know, unleashed irreversible consequences in the Middle East and the world as a whole, opening the door to U.S. interventions around the world. But the question of whether Gromyko would have been more open to dialogue with the West and China remains unanswerable. Would he have launched a new round of détente in international relations (without, of course, giving up the whole game as Gorbachev did) or would he have maintained the Zugzwang in Soviet-U.S. affairs that Reagan and Andropov had established?

the Soviet concessions at Madrid did not prove enough to prevent the stationing of US Euromissiles as part of NATO’s dual-track decision, and Moscow found itself in economic and political Zugzwang at the end of the Andropov era, as Vladislav Zubok has pointed out.

The empirical domain has illustrated Kazakhstan’s carefully calibrated hedging position amid the two regional Leviathans engaged in leverage seeking. The current paradigm insinuates that to respond to China’s rise, Russia is compelled to increase its engagement with Kazakhstan by maintaining its hierarchical grip over Nur-Sultan, while offering sufficient security provision (CSTO and, partly, SCO) and means for economic development (EAEU) to ensure that it remains in the Kremlin-centric political order. Nevertheless, Russia has not yet entirely released itself from the zugzwang situation, as it has to further resort to reactionary acts to restrain a rising China, despite the fact that any move possible would further constrain Russia geopolitically stemming from Beijing’s increasing power projection, chiefly in the economic domain (SREB).