Russia Archive

Ever since Russia briefly interrupted natural gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year’s Day 2006, Moscow has been harshly criticized in the West for allegedly using energy as a tool to blackmail its neighbors. The recent spat between Russia and Belarus over Moscow’s price hike on oil and gas deliveries to Minsk once again prompted charges from Western politicians and pundits that Russia is not a reliable source of energy. But where many Westerners perceive Russia as a regional bully, the Kremlin argues that former Soviet republics are not entitled to cheap Russian energy simply because Russia’s major export pipelines […]

MOSCOW — On Dec. 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of the Security Council in Moscow dedicated to addressing the social and economic problems of the Russian Far East. In Putin’s assessment, the situation in the region, which borders China, had become so grave as to constitute a threat to the country’s national security. According to a transcript on the Kremlin website, Putin declared in his opening remarks that past government action had failed to overcome the Far East’s grave problems. These include the district’s declining Russian population and its imbalanced economic activities. Putin also warned that the […]