Carnegie Moscow Center
There are tough times ahead for U.S.-Belarusian relations. Reimposing sanctions will lead to a new stage of the diplomatic crisis and a further toughening of rhetoric.
Turkey has been sitting on two chairs, doing geopolitical business with Russia and calling on the United States on a case-by-case basis when interests happen to converge. Now the United States is giving Turkey a taste of its own medicine, and applying its own version of transactionalism.
Perhaps the most important thing for the Russian leadership in this episode was to prevent the need to actually go to war against Ukraine in the future. Going overkill in terms of military maneuvers on the Ukrainian border now may avoid the need to do terrible things at a later point.
For now, neither Russian business nor the government or society understands the problem of climate change and why they should be doing anything about it. This lack of understanding could ultimately be more damaging to the Russian economy than all the current Western sanctions.
With Moscow massing its troops on Ukraine’s eastern border and in Crimea, Kyiv has little chance of standing its ground if the standoff deteriorates into a military confrontation. Yet there are reasons to believe that neither side intends to unleash a war.
To save its approval ratings, the Kremlin might be better focusing its energy elsewhere.
The British government’s Integrated Review implies that there can be no cooperation with Moscow until the Russian government either changes its policies in a fundamental way or is replaced by a government with a very different policy agenda.
Podcast host Alex Gabuev; Darshana Baruah, an associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Michito Tsuruoka, an associate professor at Keio University in Tokyo, examine relations in and around the Indo-Pacific.
A generational shift will take place if young Russians decide to break with the values of an antiquated state. This process could take a very long time and include periods of regression, but it could also happen much quicker than expected.
This episode looks at the domestic and international reception of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
Three decades after the collapse of the USSR, the mindset of Soviet-American détente and “equal, mutually beneficial cooperation” is hopelessly outdated.
The political messages of the opposition aren’t enough to rouse the average Russian, who still fears one thing above all: that a change in political regime might only make things worse.
James Schoff, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Asia Program, explains the U.S. position on the close relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, and how Washington views economic cooperation between the two neighbors.
Ahead of the first virtual summit of the Quad countries (the United States, Japan, Australia, and India), Ashley J. Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, looked at the relationship between Russia and India, the role of the Quad, and why Delhi is keen to include Moscow in Indo-Pacific affairs.
Putin has long positioned himself as a global opposition figure, and will now be able to feel like one of the Russian opposition politicians with whom the authorities refuse to engage for fear of creating a political equivalence.
We are unlikely to see a political or economic breakthrough in Russo-Japanese relations. Japan won’t be trying to repeat Abe’s efforts to that end in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, bilateral relations could well grow naturally under minimally favorable conditions.
U.S. and European sanctions against Russia, as well as the U.S. trade war with China, are good reasons for Moscow and Beijing to persevere with their plan to build a wide-body airplane, despite their differences.
The emergence of a Pax Sinica including Russia could draw new dividing lines over Eurasia.
As Russia becomes increasingly pulled into China’s tech orbit, the Rubicon will be the Kremlin’s final decision on whether to use Chinese or Western technology to develop 5G networks in Russia—and currently Chinese companies look like the favorites.
As the destabilization of the Indo-Pacific region continues and disagreements between key players escalate, the Russo-Japanese security dialogue may acquire growing significance.