Russia Archive

In mid-January, Georgian musicians played a concert in front of hundreds of people in downtown Tbilisi to protest the government’s ongoing negotiations with Russian state energy giant Gazprom to increase imports of natural gas. The protests were only the latest in a string of demonstrations going back to last fall, when news of government talks with Gazprom first came to light. According to the Georgian Energy Ministry, its talks with Russia are part of efforts to boost energy supplies amid growing domestic consumption. The Georgian government’s decision to try and buy more Russian gas has emerged as a full-blown controversy […]

“You’ve got to fake it till you make it!” Long the refrain of aspiring actors and entrepreneurs who have to pretend to be famous or rich well before they are either, this might also be a good motto for international peacemakers grappling with the Syrian war. This week, diplomats and United Nations officials are supposed to gather in Geneva for talks between the Syrian government and a cluster of opposition groups. It is still not absolutely clear when the conclave will begin. It was meant to start today. Now it looks like it might be Wednesday or later. The meeting […]

Wherever you look these days, unhappy regional powers and even some weak states are demonstrating a startling degree of contempt for the supposed masters of the international system. In the past two weeks, Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies have precipitated a crisis with Iran that threatens to wreck the U.S. opening to Tehran, while North Korea has infuriated China with its so-called hydrogen bomb test. In Africa, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, once a darling of aid donors, has declared that he will run for a third term in office, having already revised the country’s constitution to eliminate its erstwhile […]

What was your favorite diplomatic breakthrough of 2015? There were quite a few to choose from. For arms control experts, there was the nuclear deal with Iran. For trade specialists, there was the Trans-Pacific Partnership. For environmentalists, there was the COP21 Paris climate change agreement. Add in a few other noteworthy bargains, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and 2015 was a bonanza year for international cooperation, at least in terms of pumping out diplomatic verbiage. But the biggest diplomatic achievement of the past 12 months may have been the simple fact that Russia and the West avoided a return […]