Month: February 2009

February 13, 2009

Grigory Pasko: Re-Mapping the World, Russian Style

The empire’s gone, but the ambitions remain Grigory Pasko, journalist Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. In the nearest future, a new geographic map will be published in Russia in which Abkhazia a...
February 13, 2009

More Fake Corruption Cases

Whenever I catch a headline reading something like “Russian Officials Charged with Corruption” I have to remind myself to not take it at face value, especially when the head of the investigative committee is not without his own allegat...
February 13, 2009

The Use of Illusions about Russia

There seems to be a growing chorus on the right wing of those adamantly opposed to Joe Biden’s idea of “pressing the reset button” on relations with Russia.  After the concessions we’ve seen put forward so far with no ...
February 13, 2009

Berlin 2016

The following opinion article by Robert Amsterdam was published in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. In a shock to German consumers and politicians of all stripes, on January 1, 2016, Russia suspended supplies of gas to Germany through the Nord...
February 13, 2009

NATO’s New Front

Lost in the hubbub of Joe BIden’s ‘reset’ speech was a relatively active past couple of days concerning Russian, American, and European geopolitics in the Arctic. At the end of January, NATO officials met in Iceland, where they d...
February 13, 2009

Energy Blast – Feb 13th, 2009

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he was willing to consider incentives to reverse a further decline in oil output, which, the Energy Minister predicts, will drop by at least 8% through 2013.  Russia is taking steps to stake its claim in Arc...
February 13, 2009

Today in Russian Business – Feb 13th, 2009

The idea of merging Norilsk Nickel with several other Russian miners is generally agreed to have no merit, and to be a means of merely unloading company debts onto the state, but mergers have not been ruled out entirely, suggests one of the compan...
February 13, 2009

RA’s Daily Russia News Blast – Feb 13th, 2009

TODAY: IT revolution and pollution on the government’s agenda; Maria Sergeyeva: polarizing the blogosphere; Rogozin baits NATO; US-Russia space collision creates debris; schoolteacher may be fired for protesting.President Dmitry Medvedev has...
February 12, 2009

Button Reset

There were a couple of interesting developments today that suggested the ways in which U.S.-Russia relations might play out under the Obama administration. Firstly, U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns, a former ambassador in Russia, met wit...
February 12, 2009

Energy As Foreign Policy

In her new book, “Power, Energy, and the New Russian Imperialism,” Anita Orban, the director of the Budapest-based Constellation Energy Institute, argues that the Kremlin’s foreign policy can be almost entirely pinned to the stre...