In spite of President Dmitri Medvedev’s great designs for Russia, his country is still in trouble, plagued by archaic power structures, aging military hardware and leadership and being the last of the BRICs to move out of recession. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has some advice to offer. Writing for The New York Times, he […]
With Russia refusing to commit to sanctions on Iran while protracting the negotiations on nuclear arms reduction, the average American politico might begin to wonder whether their former Cold War rival is obstructing American foreign policy for the sheer fun of it. Owen Matthews believes it’s exactly that. Writing for Newsweek, he claims that as […]
Europe has missed an opportunity to draw Ukraine into the Western camp.
“Westerners often see Russian politics in terms of a high-level struggle between liberals and conservatives,” observes Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writing for The Moscow Times. For instance, under President Boris Yeltsin, reformers fought nationalists while under Vladimir Putin, economic liberals opposed the siloviki — a class of politicians that originally served […]
“The bear still has teeth,” notes Robert D. Kaplan, writing for The Atlantic. The Obama Administration’s decision to scrap the Eastern European missile defense system has left some former Soviet satellite states at the mercy of Moscow once again — or at least, that’s how they see it. Understandably, some Poles and Czechs reacted to […]
