Contemporary Russian foreign policy demonstrates a dual approach to state sovereignty, using a Westphalian model of sovereignty outside the former Soviet region and a post-Soviet model inside it. This approach performs three functions in contemporary Russian foreign policy: securing Russian national interests at domestic, regional, and international levels; balancing against the United States; and acting as a marker of ‘non-Western’ power identity in an emergent multipolar order. The conflict between these two models increasingly appears to threaten the last of these objectives, however, and as a means of advancing foreign policy objectives the approach thus appears caught in a self-defeating logic. OF ALL THE AREAS OF FRICTION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE UNITED States (and its allies), few are proving to be more significant than the dispute over sovereignty—its meaning and its limits. A radical rethinking of the theory and practice of sovereignty in the post-Cold War world, informed by the liberal political values deriving from the hegemonic influence of the US, and evident in several US-led interventions, has called into question the primacy of state sovereignty in contemporary international relations. Outside the boundaries of the former Soviet Union, Russia has responded by strongly reasserting the principle of state sovereignty as the basis of international law and international relations. At the same time, however, Russia has shown an entirely different approach to state sovereignty within the post-Soviet space. Russia has demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the state sovereignty principle in its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states in 2008 and its incorporation of Crimea in 2014, in both cases despite the opposition of the states (Georgia and Ukraine) in which these regions were located. This clearly contradicts the Russian position on state sovereignty in relation to Iraq, Serbia, Syria, and other cases, which is set out in key policy documents and government statements.