[1][2] The doctrine takes its name from Yevgeny Primakov, who was appointed as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation by President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
[4][5] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov brought the "Primakov doctrine" term into the geopolitical lexicon as least as early as 2014.
[6] Mark Bassin observed that "a variety of very different Eurasian perspectives and doctrines have been articulated", and he pointed out those of Gennady Zyuganov and Aleksandr Dugin along with Primakov's.
Of these three, Bassin describes Dugin as the best known and most prolific representative of post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism, and indeed Vladimir Putin was said by some as early as 2001 to be "a closet Eurasian".
What happens in the Black Sea with Putin's pervasive patchwork politics of pipelines, intimidation, occupation, and annexation is therefore only one variation of a theme that resonates throughout all of Russia's geopolitical ambitions.