Russia Archive

After a lull, violence in Ukraine escalated once again this week, as Russian-backed rebels launched offensives both in the besieged eastern cities of Donetsk and Luhansk and on a new front, against the southeastern port of Mariupol. Peace talks in Minsk were canceled today in response to civilian casualties in Donetsk. According to the Financial Times, Western intelligence officials are increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not just trying to keep Ukraine destabilized, but actively working to carve out a viable Russian puppet state, to be called “Novorossiya” (New Russia), in southeastern Ukraine. While Putin’s ultimate ambition remains […]

In the past year, Russian aggressiveness has led the United States to augment its military presence in Europe. Even though declining oil prices and a paralyzing degree of corruption and inefficiency have, for the time being, put a brake on Moscow’s ambitions, hostility will persist so long as Russian President Vladimir Putin is in charge. As a result, bolstering European security will remain a central component of America’s global strategy. But what happens after Putin? While there are no serious challenges to his rule now, he is mortal. At some point, he will leave the scene. Historically, the departure of […]

Earlier today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov acknowledged that Russia is bracing for a rough year. “We will survive any hardship in the country—eat less food, use less electricity,” Shuvalov said. Russia, whose economy has been pummeled by falling global energy prices and Western sanctions in response to the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, has seen a steep drop in the value of the ruble since last month. But Russia is not the only country affected by the ruble’s collapse. Russia under President Vladimir Putin has been one of the world’s […]

Yesterday, the Belarusian ruble rebounded slightly in international currency markets for the first time since the Russian ruble plummeted in value in December. The gain follows emergency steps taken earlier this month by Belarus’ central bank to devalue the ruble by 7 percent, increase the main refinancing rate and add a new export tax on potash, all in an attempt to manage the fallout from Russia’s sudden economic crisis. This in turn followed a move in late December to replace Belarus’ prime minister and the head of the central bank in order to aggressively respond to the currency drop. The […]

Following a long-standing Gaullist tradition, and driven by romantic memories of their alliance from the two world wars, France has been careful to maintain good relations with Russia while remaining a member of NATO. But the Ukraine crisis has led to a significant change in France’s Russia policy, as evidenced by the saga over the sale to Russia of two Mistral-class warships. That deal was arranged in 2011 by President Francois Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy. Encouraged by his prime minister, Francois Fillon, a traditional Gaullist, and his defense minister, Herve Morin, who was keen on ensuring jobs for the beleaguered […]

Following a meeting in Tehran yesterday with visiting Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called on Russia to assume a more active role in multilateral talks over Iran’s nuclear program, which will resume later this week. Despite fears that the meeting could produce a shift in Russia’s stance in the talks, however, it produced no unusual announcements or initiatives. The lack of drama from Ryabkov’s trip provides yet another welcome sign that Russian threats to abandon the United States on the Iranian nuclear issue are mostly bluff. In November 2014, a senior National Security Council […]

Where will international stabilization forces intervene in 2015? Potential answers include Libya, Syria, Nigeria’s northern borderlands and eastern Ukraine. Restoring order in any one of these places, let alone two or more at once, would be a daunting task. Libya is sinking into full-scale civil war. Syria has been ravaged by four years of violence, leaving over 200,000 dead. The Boko Haram militant group has inflicted repeated defeats on the Nigerian military in a conflict punctuated by massacres by both sides. Russia retains the ability to turn the war in Ukraine on and off at leisure. Few countries outside these […]

With combat operations in Afghanistan fading in the rearview mirror, the United States is turning its attention to finding ways to stem Russian aggression. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration supports the creation of a new NATO rapid reaction force and is sending more troops and tanks to Europe. These steps are intended to revive deterrence of Russia. They may do so given the nature of the challenge that Russia poses, but they also underscore the limitations of the old Cold War notion of deterrence in today’s security environment. When the Soviet Union fielded nuclear weapons during the opening years of […]

U.S. President Barack Obama has returned from his holiday vacation in Hawaii to start a “barnstorming” tour across the United States to make the case for his domestic policy agenda in the run-up to the State of the Union address on Jan. 20. Faced with a new Republican-controlled Congress that will not be particularly hospitable to his proposals, Obama is likely to emphasize his core domestic priorities. When he does return to foreign policy matters after the address, Obama, like other “fourth quarter” presidents before him, will likely begin to sort the issues facing him in his last two years […]

On Jan. 1, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flagship geopolitical project, the Eurasian Union, formally came into existence. Building on the existing Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Eurasian Union’s official goals are to enhance its members’ economic prosperity and political influence by promoting the free flow of capital, goods, labor and services, and by coordinating their agricultural, energy, industrial and transportation sectors. Back in the fall of 2011, when still prime minister, Putin made establishing a Eurasian Union among the former Soviet republics a major theme of his successful presidential campaign. He argued that by coordinating their […]

When diplomats want to explore a way out of a crisis, they like to talk about striking a “grand bargain” and try to avoid the word “climb-down,” which tends to imply an acknowledgement of failure or defeat. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States, trapped in costly confrontations over Syria and Ukraine, may need to agree to a sort of “grand climb-down” that allows the two powers to get out of unsustainable positions as painlessly as possible. Moscow and Washington both begin 2015 stuck with the consequences of poor strategic bets. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine now looks like a truly disastrous […]

Just before Russians rang in the new year, opposition activist Alexei Navalny received a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for alleged fraud, while his younger brother Oleg faces imprisonment for the same term. Since Oleg is not known for his political activities, the move was widely interpreted as hostage-taking, indicating that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to silence the elder Navalny without making him a martyr. As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker, “This is a familiar tactic in a state with a long legacy of terror: in the nineteen-seventies, the Soviet government forced dissidents to leave the country by making […]