Carnegie Moscow Center
As Russia and Japan are carefully embarking on a fresh attempt to fully normalize their relations, closer and more regular contacts in the foreign and security field, including military exercises, may be useful as confidence-building.
Now that Saakashvili is finally history, the chances that Russia will soon take an active interest in Georgia are going up. This would concern the settlement of the main issue in Georgian-Russian relations—the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The Netherlands filed a claim against Russia in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, in connection with detaining the activists and crew of Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise. Acting by challenging the state that no one wants to irritate, the Dutch decided to take a principled stand and stick to it to the very end.
Putin has always flirted with the new Russian nationalism, never embracing it outright. Now he faces a dilemma as the phenomenon he helped create weakens the basis of his Eurasian Union project.
In May 2012, the arrest of ordinary demonstrators on Bolotnaya Square and the riot charges pressed against them signalled the authorities’ shift from soft authoritarianism that tolerates limited discontent to a more repressive style of government.
There is no need to invent a special day like the National Unity Day for strengthening national identity, because one day in a year cannot change people's vision of their nation. This is an everyday job for the citizens at all levels of Russian society.
“National identity” and “nationalism”—there is nothing permanent about them. They vary, depending upon who speaks about them, and they change as time goes by. Those who resort to ultra-nationalism now in Russia had better hurry, because the nation states are losing efficacy, and values transform as economy and society change.
On November 4, President Putin spoke in the Kremlin about cohesion, consolidation, and indissoluble unity of the people of Russia. Government policies, in contrast, do more to deepen the xenophobic sentiments than to temper them. If the Day of National Unity was established as a step toward consolidating the Russian nation, today it sounds at best as a celebration of wishful thinking.
Russia does not have and will probably never have a specific event that can become a symbol of national consolidation. Still, something specific that consolidates everyone at once is necessary and the Kremlin wants people to nationally unite against the external enemies.
Russia-EU relations are of a technical rather than strategic character nowadays. A parallel functioning of the EU and the Eurasian Union would lead to more debate about strategic vision of Europe and the Eurasian continent.