Carnegie Moscow Center
It is not enough to urge Vladimir Putin to leave office. The Russian opposition must also seek the elimination of the autocratic model of power that Putin represents, and push for real constitutional political reform.
Relations between the Kremlin and Kyiv are at a new low after serious gas shortages in Europe this winter. Ukraine needs to be doing more to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas.
Russia has been in a post-empire state for the last 20 years. There is no way back to an empire now—Russia has passed the point of no return in this respect.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, Russia has substantial leverage in the post-Soviet space and is the EU's most important neighbor. However, in the coming decades Russia will face serious internal and international challenges.
The core issue in the NATO-Russia relationship is the mutual deficit of trust. The Euro-Atlantic area needs a “security community,” where no member expects any other state to use force or threaten to use force against it.
Enhanced energy security is particularly important for a more cohesive security collaboration among the states of the Euro-Atlantic region.
Today, unprecedented challenges from without and within threaten to reverse the progress toward the safe, secure, undivided Euro-Atlantic world hoped for in the wake of the Cold War. To overcome that future, a twenty-first-century problem demands a twenty-first-century solution.
One of the fundamental impediments to molding the Euro-Atlantic nations into a more unified and workable security community is the lingering distrust that poisons too many of the region’s key relationships.
Vladimir Putin’s article in the Izvestia daily demonstrates both his anxiety over the recent protests and his inability to recognize how significantly Russian society is changing.
The election of a young reformer to the presidency in the breakaway region of Transnistria is a triumph for democracy, but it does not signal an irrevocable turn towards the West.