Russian Foreign Policy and Security

Two questions arise when the role of a diaspora in crisis is considered. Do diasporas embody an internal threat to the security of the nation state? And why do some efforts to use diasporas as a tool of international politics succeed while others fail? In this paper, the Ukrainian 2014-2015...

After denying Russian intervention in Crimea, President Putin ultimately recognized that it indeed happened and then used fallacious arguments to justify it. 

In 2014, Germany’s relations with Russia markedly deteriorated. The decline was precipitous but it did not occur suddenly. It began some time before Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the Kremlin’s support for separatism and thinly concealed military intervention in eastern...

For much of the post-Soviet period, Central Asia has been a backwater of Russian foreign policy. But things are changing. Circumstances in and beyond the region are driving a more committed approach in Moscow. 

Recent events have provided the opportunity for the rekindling of relations between Ukraine and the European Union.

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

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.

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...