Russia

May 7, 2009

Free Trade for Georgia

Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Republican Congressman David Dreier have published a piece in the Washington Post arguing that one of the best ways for the United States to contribute to Georgia’s security would be a free trade agreement.&nbs...
May 7, 2009

The Gazprom Spies

Things used to be so much more exciting for TNK-BP in Russia before they put former German Chancellor and Kremlin confident Gerhard Schröder on its board of directors.  No more office raids, no more regulatory expropriation attempts, visa den...
May 6, 2009

Zhirinovsky Links Georgia and Venezuela

I personally don’t subscribe to the idea that Washington holds Latin America in the same regard as Moscow does the former states of the Soviet Union.  Certainly, throughout history there has been no shortage of unfortunate if not brutal...
May 6, 2009

Gazprom Losing its Grip on Central Asia?

Today the Wall Street Journal is running an interesting piece about a summit to be held on Friday including all the potential participants of the Nabucco pipeline project, breathing fresh live into the embattled EU energy transit project.  Th...
May 6, 2009

Russia’s Arms Sales to Venezuela Don’t Impress

It appears that after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has dedicated such a large portion of budget, making his country the largest buyer of Russian arms in the world, that the products he’s acquiring from Moscow are of pretty shoddy quality...
May 6, 2009

Avoiding Confrontation

First Russia extended their troops to the borders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then there was a rebellion of a tank battalion, followed by the expulsion of two Canadian diplomats working for NATO.  Kind of like a tit-for-tat and tat in resp...
May 6, 2009

Resetting Impunity

A few days ago we posted some comments and video from American observers on U.S.-Russian relations, which included some exchange of views on realism and the whole “reset button” approach to the Kremlin currently being offered by the Ob...
May 5, 2009

A Challenged Diarchy

Igor Torbakov from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki has an opinion piece on the Russian tandemocracy of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev posted over at EurasiaNet, examining how this political structure may be insuffici...
May 5, 2009

The West is Failing Ukraine

Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski writes in the Wall Street Journal, calling on Europe to renew its promises of 1989. Despite these achievements, the process of making Europe “whole and free” is incomplete — and will...
May 5, 2009

Mutiny in Georgia

It seems that if Russia wanted to do something dramatic about Georgia, now would be the perfect time, given that Barack Obama’s options may be more constrained now than in the future and Mikheil Saakashvili is on political death watch. ...