Author: Pavel K. Baev / Eurasia Daily Monitor

Russia’s geopolitical influence is increasingly shrinking in the Baltic Sea region. The most recent episode in the region’s worsening relations with Moscow was the sudden arrival of hundreds of migrants from the Middle East and Africa in November to the busy border crossing between Russia and southeastern Finland (Kommersant, November 30). The Finnish government responded...

The degradation of Russian morale in the trenches of Avdiyivka and Bakhmut has driven Moscow to try altering the course of the war with a revival of nuclear blackmail tactics. On October 30, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated that Western attempts to inflict strategic defeat on Russia has increased the risk of a direct...

Russia’s war against Ukraine has crossed the 600-day mark, and the fighting between Israel and the Hamas terrorists based in Gaza has passed its 10th day. The effects of the latter on the former are still emerging. The interplay between these two major breakdowns in the world order is certain to be strong. Russian President...

The annual gathering of the Valdai International Discussion Club was held in Sochi, Russia, recently. Today, this conference does not deserve the attention such events used to have a decade ago, when many Western experts saw it as a unique opportunity to gain access to Russian policy-makers, particularly President Vladimir Putin. The only topic touched...

Russia’s strategy for prevailing in the long war with Ukraine does not have a protracted timeline and looks no further than 2024. It is based on three premises: economic performance will keep the war machine going; Western support for Ukraine will erode and contract; and the Ukrainian army’s capacity to conduct offensive operations will be...

Neither New York, nor Washington rolled out the red carpet for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He came ready for tough challenges and succeeded in making the case for sustained global and U.S. attention to condemning and defeating Russia’s all-out aggression. Mr. Zelenskyy spoke at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly and at...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence at the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in New Delhi on September 9 and 10 was not all that surprising and seemed hardly registered by any of the two dozen world leaders who attended. Putin also missed the previous summit in Bali, Indonesia, and did not attend the most recent...

Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine, which will pass the 18-month mark next week, is indirectly but strongly connected to the Russo-Georgian war of 15 years ago. In the first week of August 2008, Georgian villages in South Ossetia, a separatist enclave controlled by Russia since 1992, came under heavy artillery fire; on August 14, Russian...

The decision to withdraw from the international arrangement guaranteeing the safety of grain exports from Ukrainian ports, announced in Moscow on July 17, signifies a significant effort to escalate non-kinetic hostilities to break the pattern of slow-moving defeat in this war of attrition. Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the benefits that Ukraine...

The outcome of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Vilnius on July 11 and 12 left the Russian leadership confused and anxious. The controversial issue of Ukraine’s membership in the alliance was left pending, as had been planned. Thus, some official mouthpieces in Moscow and many “patriotic-military” bloggers have rushed to pronounce the...

Questions about the drivers, participants and consequences of the Wagner Group mutiny on June 23 and 24 are set to remain unanswered as the Russian leadership finds it necessary to close that shocking page. President Vladimir Putin has executed a sharp turn from describing Yevgeny Prigozhin’s escapade as “high treason” and a “stab in the...

The summer economic forum in St. Petersburg used to be a vanity fair of Russian opulence and corruption. But last week’s modest, if not frugal, event was rather an exercise in self-reassurance of sustainable stagnation. The international profile of the event was seriously curtailed, and the guest of honor was Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who...