In Syria, as elsewhere, Russia is acting according to a system whereby it escalates a crisis so as to claim a role in the world and challenge “American leadership.” This pattern of behavior dangerously simplifies the complexities of world politics. When one intervention ends, Russia is forced to look for a new one.

Russian consumers are increasingly unhappy, but their discontent is being frozen in depression rather than manifested in social protest.

Changing and burdensome tax regulations for the Russian oil industry are deterring foreign investors and causing problems with attracting financing for long-term growth. New proposals by the Finance Ministry, if implemented, would only make things worse.

Recently re-elected Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is making maneuvers to get closer to the West and distance himself from Russia. But Moscow is not worried: it knows that his fundamental values differentiate him from Western countries.

The award of the world's most prestigious literary prize to Svetlana Alexievich is a seal of approval for her genre of polyphonic non-fiction and her insights into the catastrophes of the Soviet era.

Reforming Belarus requires a long-term strategy, taking into account the emerging civil society and changes in the opposition.

Little more than a week into Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria, new evidence has emerged about the Russian public’s attitudes towards Putin’s latest military intervention.

Putin is laying claim to the legacy of the 1945 Yalta conference. But Russia's attempts to rewrite history to justify its current policies are not working.

The parallels between the late Soviet era and contemporary Russia are indeed striking. But is this analogy applicable? Not entirely. To assess Russia’s future we should look not to its own recent history, but to the developments in countries that experienced similar transitions.

Vladimir Putin is making a bid to regain global respectability by leading a fight against ISIS and evoking the anti-Hitler coalition of World War II. The West is yet to be convinced that the appeal to be “brothers-in-arms” is serious.

Many people are trying to rewrite the history of the 2008 Georgia-Russia War in the light of the Ukraine crisis. The EU’s report on the war is still a useful baseline and a reminder of how different the two conflicts are.

The recent decline in the Chinese stock exchange reveals economic weaknesses that Russia had been trying to ignore. Russia’s relationship to China has too many emotional mood swings and needs to be more pragmatic.

A new Ukrainian campaign to blockade Crimea is a gift for the Kremlin as it tries to distract the public’s attention away from the major challenges facing the peninsula and the questionable actions being undertaken by the Russian government against its population.

Even as confrontation deepens between Russia and the West in other parts of the post-Soviet space, the Karabakh conflict has its own logic and still compels the geopolitical rivals to work together.

As the Russian economy declines, Vladimir Putin faces a classic choice between greater freedom and more repression

Local elections in Russia last weekend seemed to confirm the dominance of United Russia, the “party of power.” But the Kremlin may be forced to end its reliance on United Russia before next year’s Duma elections.

Russia’s oil and gas industry faces long-term systemic problems, even in the unlikely scenario that the price of oil rises sharply again. This has severe implications for the country’s economic prospects.

A new set of economic proposals by Sergei Glazyev defy generally accepted economic theories and historical experience and would probably ruin the Russian economy if accepted. Is there a political rather than an economic rationale to them?

Official statistics suggest that Russia’s oil and gas industry accounts for only a quarter of the country’s GDP. However, when other factors are factored in, the economy is seen to be much more heavily dependent on hydrocarbons. With oil prices looking set to stay low for a long time, this is bad news for the Russian economy.

Putin's visit to China is his first since the West's introduction of sectoral sanctions against Russia. Moscow’s hopes for greater engagement with China have gone unfulfilled. Due to falling commodity prices, sanctions, the volatility of the ruble and the economic crisis in Russia, trade and investments continue to decline, while agreeing on new deals is becoming increasingly difficult.