Foreign Policy and Security

Moscow has every intention of including Ukraine in its Eurasian Union, with one major playing card: the exchange of Kiev’s sovereignty for economic and financial advantages.

Ukraine is divided along historical, ideological, economic, religious and linguistic lines, which it has failed to unite in its brief history. 

The Asia-Pacific region has assumed primary importance as a center of global politics and economic dynamism. For Moscow, this development highlights a world in which many long-standing assumptions about international politics are being overturned. It speaks of “global power … shifting to the...

Do the peace talks between Japan and Russia, reopened in March 2013 by Shinzo Abe and Vladimir Putin, have any chance of success? A window of opportunity has indeed opened for an historic rapprochement between Russia and Japan. 

It may appear that Russia is equally dissatisfied with both Western security’s presence in and its departure from Afghanistan planned for 2014, but whether the Western withdrawal is seen as more of a gain a loss depends on how Moscow itself assesses and balances its own security concerns in...

The reconfiguration of the regional system of international relations as a result of the Arab revolutions has engendered fresh challenges for Russia, related, amongst other things, to deteriorating relations with the USA and other Western powers. 

The interplay of the foreign, domestic and military dimensions of Russia's Arctic policy is characterized by peculiar incompatibilities. The position of power secured by the military superiority and ambitious modernization of strategic forces is supposed to grant Moscow strong influence and...

The Russian Federation is shaping its religious diplomacy (i.e., in brief, the use of the religious factor in foreign policy) and exercises it with a growing efficiency. This is, to a certain degree, a consequence of processes taking place in Russia, namely, first and foremost, the solving of...

After serious decline in the 1990s, Ukraine's economy finally started its recovery and systemic reform in early 2000. While the economy rapidly grew by 2008, its transformation remained unfinished. Ukraine has three possible roads to development. 

As Moscow and the WTO Member States have finally established terms on which Russia will accede to the organization, thoughts turn to the impact of this historic event and the potential for it to play a role in the modernization of the country’s economy. The process has been long, with Russia...