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Putin Plays from Cold War Handbook - James Kitfield, National Journal

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows exactly how this gambit goes down: an intercept of a secret meeting arranged by the third secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow; a U.S. off...

The Curious Case of the Goofy U.S. Spy - Julia Ioffe, The New Republic

The whole incident is a strange one. First of all, wigs and a compass? Really? Did he not graduate up to the Groucho Marx glasses?...

Stalin Would Be Proud of Putin - Victor Davidoff, Moscow Times

One year ago on May 7, President-elect Vladimir Putin's motorcade traversed the empty streets of Moscow, cleared of every living soul by the police, t...

Great U.S.-Russia Convict Chess Battle - Tom Balmforth, Transmission

Forget bewigged "spies" and the impasse over Syria. Could chess and convicts take the sting out of U.S.-Russia ties? Today, 20 prisoners from the United States and Russia are sch...

Obama's One-Sided 'Reset' with Russia - Mark Salter, RealClearPolitics

President Obama’s long courtship of Vladimir Putin is a persuasive rebuttal to the argument that his failures are attributable to his detached, analytical approach to politic...

Downsides of U.S. Energy Independence - Konrad Yakabuski, Globe & Mail

What is more appropriately defined as North American oil independence -- since the United States will continue to depend on Canadian and Mexican crude for decades to come -- is alm...

Russia's Next Decade: Buckle Up - Lipman & Petrov, Moscow Times

Analysts have been releasing various scenarios of how Russia might develop over the next 10 years. Although each scenario is different, they all have some features in common. Below...

Assad Winning with a Little Help from His Friends - Liz Sly, Wash Post

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are beginning to turn the tide of the country’s war, bolstered by a new strategy, the support of Iran and Russia and the assistan...

Vladimir Putin's Witch Hunt - Washington Post

Of all the repressive measures President Vladimir Putin of Russia has taken in the last decade, one of the most consistently destructive has unfolded in recent weeks. At Mr. Putin&...

Why Kerry Succeeded in Russia - Nikolas Gvosdev, World Politics Review

John Kerry undertook his maiden voyage to Moscow as U.S. secretary of state this week, and the initial impression is that his visit was a success. There was a perceptible thaw in w...

How to Stop Iran's Takeover of Syria - Michael Weiss, NOW Lebanon

It's been edifying to see how quickly the international press has discovered that Syrian air defense systems are not quite so "formidable" as they were once described by senior Pen...

U.S. Should Push for Elections in Syria - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Time

The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict -- no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth -- would sim...

Putin: A Man the West Can Do Business With? - Con Coughlin, Telegraph

When David Cameron arrives at the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Friday for talks with Vladimir Putin, he would be well advised to bring a good book with him to while away the time....

Gloom at a Moscow Protest - Masha Gessen, Latitude

Under a menacing gray sky, people walked across the Great Stone Bridge, which spans the Moscow River at one end of the Kremlin. Dressed mostly in dark clothing, they walked purpo...

Putin Is No Match for Russia's Massive Corruption - Bloomberg

President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on corruption is vital to Russia’s future. It’s also certain to fail unless he recognizes the shortcomings of his methods. In 2008, under...

Don't 'Reset' with Putin - Crack Down on Him - Elisa Massimino, Bloomberg

As Secretary of State John Kerry visits Moscow today to try to shore up fraying relations, the show trial of the dissident Alexey Navalny also should be on the agenda. The anti-cor...

Obama's 'Red Line' Runs Through Moscow - David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy

Because Russia is the one key player in this equation that is vulnerable to international pressure and because its behavior to date on this has been so egregious, Kerry must be cle...

How One Russian Will Become Immortal - Fruzsina Eordogh, Motherboard

Dmitry Itskov wants to live forever. The 32-year-old Russian billionaire and media mogul thinks he can do this by building himself (and everyone) an android body by the year 2045. ...

Will Anti-Putin Protests Revive Movement? - Julia Ioffe, New Republic

onday’s rally in Moscow started with a moment of silence to commemorate the event, exactly one year ago, that sowed the seed of the protest movement’s demise....

Putin's Unsteady Year - Will Pomeranz, The National Interest

It’s been one year since Vladimir Putin’s formal return to the Russian presidency in May 2012. What he originally envisioned as a time to cement his legacy has turned into a...

Vladimir Putin, Uber-Nationalist - Schepp & Neef, Der Spiegel

Exactly one year ago, Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin following a brief hiatus. Since then, he has markedly reduced protest freedoms, undermined the judiciary and presented ...

Syria's Tragedy Can No Longer Be Contained - Daily Telegraph

The world needs to confront the implications of its inability to keep Syria's horror within its frontiers....

It's Time to Take Arctic Militarization Seriously - Rob Huebert, Nat'l Post

Canada is set to assume the chairmanship of the Arctic Council this month, and in the days leading up to this important transition there has been considerable discussion of what Ca...

What Marine Biologists Can Teach Us About Terror - Alex Berezow, RCW

A bisected starfish isn't a dead starfish: It's now two starfish. (And a starfish cut into five pieces turns into five starfish!) In the world today, civilized societies are the f...

Turkey's Fear of Russia Keeps Them from Syria - Soner Cagaptay, Atlantic

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov visited Ankara on April 17th, but the event went almost unnoticed. Despite deep differences between Ankara and Moscow over Syria, Turkey has ...

Russia Excels at Crushing Media - Willems & Puddington, Freedom House

Each year at this time, Freedom House, a Washington-based institute that specializes in research on global democracy, issues a report on the condition of press freedom around the w...

Putin's Fragile Hold on Power - Kadri Liik, ECFR

When Vladimir Putin had been in power for six years and the political system created by him was nearing the peak of its clout, one Japanese Russia-watcher remarked: "Putin's Russia...

Time to Save Belarus from Russia, Again? - Anna Dyner, EU Observer

The economic situation in Belarus in the near future will probably force the regime to sell plenty of its most profitable enterprises to Russia. As a consequence, Belarus will beco...

Despite the Danger & Smell, I Still Love Moscow - Marilyn Murray, MT

Moscow? Russia? Is it safe to live there?" This is the response I often receive when people learn I spend half of the year in Moscow. Many people from the U.S. assume that Russia i...

Russia's Stunning Self-Destruction - Alexei Bayer, Moscow Times

Early in the 20th century, three powers were vying for economic supremacy. The United States took over leadership in the Anglo-Saxon world from Britain. Newly unified Germany was a...

Russia and China Vie for Rare Earths Dominance - Dan McGroarty, RCW

One step down from the real wars -- on terror, in Syria and the daily death without end in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and a second step beneath our next wars -- nuclear menaces North ...

EU or Russia? Ukraine Must Choose - Maksim Yusin, Kommersant

Ukraine is being pulled in two directions -- on the one hand, towards Russia and its so-called Customs Unions, on the other towards the European Union. Time is running out for Kiev...

In Russia, Is Business a Crime Again? - Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg

Back in Soviet days, trading for a profit was considered a crime. If government prosecutors have their way in the case of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, Russia -- purportedly ...

We Don't Need Putin's Counter-Terrorism - Jackson Diehl, Washington Post

“What, one might think, do the irrational acts of two young American citizens of Chechen origin have in common with the Syria war,” asked the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya G...

What China and Russia Don't Get About Soft Power - Joseph Nye, FP

When Foreign Policy first published my essay "Soft Power" in 1990, who would have expected that someday the term would be used by the likes of Hu Jintao or Vladimir Putin? Yet Hu t...

The Blunt Logic of Russian Power - Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy

In the mid-19th century, Russia was not doing well. It had just been humiliated in the Crimean War, and the other European great powers were busy intriguing about the tsarist empir...

The Myth of Dirty Russian Money - Cameron & Ordzhonikidze, Moscow Times

It is not entirely clear yet when and how the Cyprus banking crisis will be resolved. But what is clear is that numerous institutional and individual Russian clients of at least tw...

Russia Plays Complex Game with Syria, Boston - Fyodor Lukyanov, RIGA

Every major terrorist act gives rise to conspiracy theories. September 11, 2001, still stirs the imagination of those who are convinced that it involved powerful forces pursuing th...

The Limits of Cooperation with Russia - Fiona Hill, Brookings Institution

In the wake of the Boston bombings, some have speculated whether cooperation on counter-terrorism could put the U.S.-Russian relationship back on a more stable footing at a particu...

Putin's Medieval Peace in Chechnya - Ben Judah, Bloomberg

The involvement of two ethnic Chechens in the Boston Marathon bombing came as a brutal reminder of the wars that ravaged the Russian republic more than a decade ago. Less understoo...

Russia Uses Boston to Argue for Assad - Alan Philps, The National

There has been a lot of confusion about the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers and their connection to the simmering conflict in Chechnya, on Russia's southern border. ...

U.S. Should Ignore Putin's Terrorism Advice - Michael Weiss, NOW

So far, and in spite of the American media's best effort to acquaint its audience with a country called Chechnya (and the Czech embassy's best efforts to remind that audience of th...

When Alienated Immigrants Turn to Terrorism - Nina Khrushcheva, MT

Whose fault is it that the Boston Marathon was bombed? Is Russia to blame for 250 years of trying to incorporate the Muslim North Caucasus nations, li...

Assad Defies the U.S. and Russia - David Ignatius, Washington Post

The growing evidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own population provides an opportunity for the United States and Russia, the two countries that ha...

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