Author: Pavel K. Baev / Eurasia Daily Monitor

Fifteen years ago, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, President Vladimir Putin surprised the high-level audience with a speech that explicitly juxtaposed Russian and Western security interests. In retrospect, the tone of the presentation was argumentative rather than assertive, but Moscow added force to its arguments by going to war against Georgia in August 2008...

The guns have so far remained silent on the snow-covered Russian-Ukrainian border, but there is certainly no peace there; a rather unusual war is in progress. It is unlike any other war waged by Russia under the lengthy rule of President Vladimir Putin, who began his first presidential term with a war in Chechnya that...

Diplomats naturally value dialogue; but when it comes to current relations with Moscow, the wisdom of such an approach looks dubious – particularly following the week of consecutive rounds of tough talks between Russia on the one hand and the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and finally the Organization for Security and...

The topics of Russia’s plight and future prospects came up again and again last week, in the December 7 video-conversation between Presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin, at the Summit of Democracies that the Biden Administration organized and hosted on December 9-10, as well as during this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, held on...

Crisis is brewing yet again in the intrinsically antagonistic relations between Russia and Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin seeks to harvest richer political dividends from it than he did half a year ago. The apparent buildup of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border follows much the same pattern; Moscow’s denials of easily detectable parks of...