Carnegie Moscow Center
The two political groups’ no-holds-barred partisan wars in Georgia may be emotionally satisfying for the principals, but it is also creating the political space for the return of conservative, Moscow-leaning parties and organizations to thrive.
Russia’s problems with Crimea and Crimea’s problems with Russia will only continue to grow.
The prospect of a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran in the next few months, if executed rigorously and embedded in wider strategies for regional order and global nuclear order, can be a significant turning point.
The story with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which ended to the benefit of Russian national interests, nevertheless exposes the weakness of the Russian decisionmaking process in relation to the Asia-Pacific.
Russia’s “pivot to Asia” is meeting with a number of challenges, such as bureaucratic inertia, lack of workable ideas, and high levels of corruption. However, there are ways of dealing with all of them.
The Western approach to Russia is predicated on the supposition that continued pressure on the country will cause Vladimir Putin’s regime to make concessions or even crumble. However, this is far from the truth.
It would be advisable for the presidents of Russia and the United States to make joint decisions to abandon the concept of launch-on-warning strikes based on the information provided by early-warning systems as well as refrain from conducting the respective exercises of the countries’ strategic nuclear forces.
The real question looming over Uzbekistan's upcoming election is not who wins, but what will happen to the country after President Islam Karimov eventually leaves power.
Putin and his policy attract sympathizers in Europe from both far left and far right. However, Russian ideologists have such a poor idea of who supports them overseas that they failed to assemble and present a convincing contingent of supporters, only embarrassing themselves in the end.
The post-Soviet elites use the system that Lee Kuan Yew constructed in Singapore to justify political crackdown. However, Lee himself believed that resource-based dictatorships will fail to replicate Singapore’s success, since restricting freedoms is not the cornerstone of his model.
Prospects for Ukraine’s long-term success and cohesion will be determined by its ability to pursue far-reaching reforms to modernize the state and to check the power of the oligarchs.
The Chechen connection to the Nemtsov’s murder has split the ruling elite. Putin’s problem is that Kadyrov has completely cleared Chechnya of all rivals, either Chechen or Russian—having fed and groomed his “dragon,” he has no Plan B in Chechnya.
Putin stated that the Russian leadership was ready to use nuclear forces in the days of the Crimean annexation, bringing back the old threat of nuclear war.
The Minsk agreements are fragile.How effectively they are implemented will depend primarily on the Europeans’ ability to convince Moscow to pressure separatists into observing the ceasefire, and on Kyiv’s ability to keep nationalist militias in line. If either side fails to do so, the fighting is likely to resume.
Russia should give the green light to the establishment of an SCO Development Bank where China takes dominant positions in the authorized capital and management bodies. In exchange, Moscow could coordinate investment principles on terms that would be most favorable to itself and its partners.
Although it began with state-owned assets, the nationalization project in Crimea quickly consumed Ukrainian and Russian private property. One year on, every significant Crimean enterprise is in the hands of local authorities, and there is little hope for privatization.
What happens to an authoritarian country that’s left without its leader and the founder of the regime?
Putin and Kadyrov resemble Siamese twins, whose separation will result in complication for both of them, and thus for the country at large. Neither one of them stood to benefit from Boris Nemtsov’s death.
The nuclear arms control regime is unraveling. An aggressive search for new formats, concepts, and methods is urgently needed to adapt the system to changed realities.
The Russian government’s decision to end cooperation with Ukraine on two space launch programs is likely due to political motivations alone and goes against the economic and technological interests of Russia, Ukraine, and many other countries. This decision is worth reconsidering.