Putin’s Conveniently Imperfect Memory
(EDM) The Kremlin press service announced last week that President Vladimir Putin would not celebrate the 15thanniversary of his first election, which occurred on March 26, 2000 (RBC.ru, March 26). Indeed,…
Scared of Putin’s Shadow: In Sanctioning Dugin, Washington Got the Wrong Man
(Foreign Affairs) On March 11, 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department placed a new round of sanctions on 14 figures that Washington considers responsible for the conflict in Ukraine. Until now, sanctions had targeted…
The “Narva Paradox” and a Reality Check
(UT Blog) (Co-authored with Stefano Braghiroli) Estonia – The annexation of Crimea and the military insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern provinces under the “Russian world” slogan triggered political and academic debates centred…
Consequences of a New Cold War
(IISS) (Co-authored with Jeremy Shapiro) The Ukraine crisis poses vexing policy challenges for Washington. President Barack Obama has sought to strike a balance between the imperative of responding to Russian…
Two Summits and a Military Exercise
(EDM) The postponed Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan summit took place last Friday (March 20) in Astana, but the program was cut so short that the only point for staging the event appeared to be…
How Russia Today is Using YouTube
(The Monkey Cage/WP) (By Robert Orttung, Elizabeth Nelson and Anthony Livshen) When Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube in an office over a California pizza shop in 2005,…
New Memo: Will the Russian Economy Accelerate in 2015?
Paradoxically, some healthy economic developments occurred in Russia in 2014 owing to its conflict with the West and the decline in oil prices. The “forced” reversal of some mistaken economic…
New Memo: Torn Between Patriotism and Economic Necessities: Russia’s EU Borderlands & the Food Embargo
In response to Western sanctions, in August 2014 Russia introduced an embargo on meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables from the EU, Norway, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The ban…
Women and Conflict in the Karabakh Conflict
(Women in War) This essay explores the dynamics involved in the political conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh during the breakdown of the Communist system. Fusing narratives obtained from the…
Exclusive: Sanctions and Regime Survival
Some debates never die; they just get replayed. After the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, the United States imposed economic sanctions against the USSR. The Russian Federation…
Free Rein of Special Services Makes Russia Ungovernable
(EDM) It took a week for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to produce a pair of plausible suspects in the shocking murder of Boris Nemtsov on February 28 (see EDM,…
Will there be a ‘full, rapid, and transparent investigation’ of Boris Nemtsov’s murder? Don’t bet on it.
(The Monkey Cage/WP) After Boris Nemtsov’s brazen assassination a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, Secretary of State John Kerry called on the Russian authorities to “to act expeditiously to investigate and…