The object of the study is Germany's humanitarian policy towards Russia as a direction of bilateral relations. The subject of this study is the dynamics of institutional and residual formats of humanitarian interaction between Germany and Russia in the context of the geopolitical crises of 2014 and 2022. The aim of the article is to identify the nature and direction of transformation of the institutional model of Germany's humanitarian policy towards Russia after 2022, including the limits of its dismantling, in comparison with the changes that began after the 2014 crisis. The hypothesis of the study is that the sustainability of individual institutions of Germany's humanitarian policy towards Russia in the context of a geopolitical crisis is determined by the presence of structural constraints on dismantling: those institutions whose activities are based on long-term bilateral agreements, economic self-sufficiency, and mirror-connectedness with paired foreign institutions are preserved even in a truncated form, while institutions devoid of such constraints are dismantled. Accordingly, the difference between the post-2014 transformation and the post-2022 dismantling is qualitative, not quantitative: in the former case, the institutional structure was maintained despite partial politicization, while in the latter, it is purposefully dismantled, encountering only the aforementioned structural constraints. The methodological basis of the study is comprised of general scientific methods: historical-comparative methods, institutional analysis, and case studies. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying and systematizing the structural factors determining the selective dismantling of institutions of Germany's humanitarian policy toward Russia. It has been established that the resilience of an institution in a crisis is ensured by a combination of long-term bilateral agreements, economic self-sufficiency, and mirror-linked relationships with its counterparts, whereas the absence of these factors leads to its dismantling. A comparison of two phases of the crisis (2014–2021 and 2022–2026) demonstrates that the transformation after 2022 is qualitatively different and more targeted compared to the partial politicization of the preceding period. At the same time, the dismantling is not total: it encounters structural constraints that ensure the preservation of residual institutional and network formats. From the perspective of the concept of "soft power," the dismantling is interpreted as a deliberate limitation by Germany of its own humanitarian resource of influence vis--vis Russia.
Lev Vladimirovich Ermokhin (Sun,) studied this question.