Category: Russia

Putin’s shadow Donbass government exposed

     

President Vladimir Putin has sent Russian mercenaries to fight in Syria and Ukraine, decorating them for their service and concealing their casualties, according to a new report: An investigation published… Read more »

Eurasia’s coming anarchy?

     

China and Russia may forge a tactical alliance based on their compatible authoritarian systems and aimed at managing their frontier areas and standing up to the West, a leading analyst… Read more »

How to resolve Russia’s constitutional crisis

     

  Russia is at a constitutional turning point. The outcome of this moment—an anti-constitutional coup or the beginning of a long effort aimed at the restoration of constitutional freedoms and… Read more »

Authoritarianism Goes Global

     

A new global competition in “soft power” is underway between democracy and autocracy, but only one side seems to be competing seriously, according to Christopher Walker, Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond,… Read more »

‘Solved?’: Investigating Boris Nemtsov’s Murder

     

One year after the public assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, General Alexander Bastrykin, has announced that the case has been “solved.” However,… Read more »

Russia’s ‘New’ Tools for Confronting the West

     

In the last two years, Russia has demonstrated its return to an assertive foreign policy by successful military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. The capabilities it employed to do so… Read more »

Obama Doctrine – pendulum swung too far?

     

  For any believer in the trans-Atlantic alliance, liberal interventionism and the overall beneficence of American power, President Obama’s long exposition of his foreign policy to Jeffrey Goldberg in The… Read more »

The Obama Doctrine: from ‘democratic messianism’ to ‘passive progressivism’?

     

  Experience has taught President Barack Obama to temper his idealism with a pragmatic, realist approach to foreign policy, leading him to reject liberal Democratic interventionism. Yet he remains a democratic… Read more »

Russia – a ‘hollow superpower’

     

Vladimir Putin was losing legitimacy even before the economy shriveled [but] with action in Ukraine and Syria, he has made it appear that Russia is the equal—and rival—of America, The… Read more »

Shaping the West’s stance toward Global Illiberalism

     

Today it looks as if the days of the [pro-Kremlin] Russlandverstehers’ unchallenged dominion in explaining Russia to Germany are over, at least on the expert level and in public opinion, analyst… Read more »