Russia

June 15, 2009

Iran Unrest Scuppers Diplomacy

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose re-election to the presidency is being hotly contested in Iran, will not be traveling to Yekaterinburg to meet with Dmitry Medvedev today on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, according ...
June 15, 2009

Russian Soft Power and Georgia

The Cicero Foundation has published a new short paper entitled “Shaping Georgia’s Future After the Russian Invasion.”  I have not given the document a careful read yet, but I have pulled the following idea from the conclusio...
June 15, 2009

From Workers’ Paradise to Totalitarian Nightmare

The Financial Times has given a pretty glowing review of “Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky” by Bertrand Patenaude The most damning indictment that Patenaude levels against Trotsky is his intellectual dishone...
June 15, 2009

The Milk War and the Removing of Lukashenko

Over the weekend I had read the reports about the bitter “milk war” going on between Russia and Belarus, which is actually just one of many food-related trade disputes we’ve seen in recent months (see also the confusing ban on U....
June 15, 2009

Video: The Pikalyovo Incident

Recently the Russian industrial town of Pikalyovo exploded in protests over unemployment and wage arrears – prompting Putin to fly in for a big media visit, which involved a public dressing down of Kremlin loyalist businessman Oleg Deripaska...
June 15, 2009

Talk vs. Action: Russia’s Currency Dilemma Continues

I’m a few days behind on this as I’ve been busy with other parts of this website, but there have been a number of developments since my post last week regarding how Russia discusses its currency maneuvers. The specific language used he...
June 14, 2009

One Consultancy’s Outlook for Oil and Mining in Russia

London-based Exclusive Analysis offers their insights to Reuters on the immediate outlook for the oil and mining sectors in Russia. Among the highlights: Rosneft and Transneft are likely to have the most trouble meeting their debt obligations, tho...
June 13, 2009

The Rhetorical Thaw

Roger E. Kanet of the University of Miami has published a new 30-page paper on U.S.-Russian relations entitled “From Cooperation to Confrontation: Russia and the United States since 9/11.”  He’s assembled quite a laundry lis...
June 13, 2009

Andrei Piontkovsky and Realism

Per Bob’s earlier post on the growing divide in Russia policy circles over what the Obama Administration can expect from today’s Kremlin, here Russian political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky (survivor of an extremism trial) answers some o...