Section: Brookings (USA)
The Mariupol line: Russia’s land bridge to Crimea
While the Minsk II ceasefire has not yet taken full hold, observance has improved since the first week after the ceasefire began, when separatist and Russian forces occupied Debaltseve in Eastern Ukraine. The question now: will the ceasefire be fully implemented? It appears fragile at best. What happens at Mariupol has become a bellwether....
Kiev, not Moscow, should be the choice for marking V-E Day
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron have rightly turned down Vladimir Putin’s invitation to go to Moscow on May 9 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allies’ victory in Europe, and President Obama may soon follow suit. However, there is still a way for Western leaders to attend a commemoration that...
Concerns about Russia’s nuclear weapons modernization are overblown
As the Ukraine-Russia crisis deepened and West-Russia relations plunged to their lowest point since the Cold War, Moscow has rattled its nuclear saber. Russian strategic rocket forces have conducted an increased number of exercises, Bear bombers have probed the air defenses of NATO members, and Vladimir Putin has engaged in nuclear...
Has the Russian System’s Agony Begun?
In politics, even the inevitable can take you by surprise, turning victory into disaster. This is what Vladimir Putin has yet to understand. The Russian system of personalized power has demonstrated an amazing knack for survival, by changing its costume and pretending to be its opposite for a while, after which it returns to its predatory ways....
Dealing with Ukraine’s critical financial and economic challenges
Event Information March 17, 2015 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM EDTSaul/Zilkha Rooms Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20036 Register for the Event Most attention on Ukraine over the past six months has focused on the conflict that the Ukrainian military has fought with separatists and Russian forces in the eastern part...
We may live in different worlds, but sanctions on Russia still make sense
My colleague, Clifford Gaddy, wrote about sanctions on Russia on this blog on March 9. He notes that the West, on the one hand, and President Vladimir Putin and Russia, on the other, hold fundamentally different views of global and national security, and argues that U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russia are bound to fail. I hesitate to...
One year of western sanctions against Russia: We still live in different worlds
Editor’s Note: This piece is adapted from an op-ed originally written for Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, a Berlin-based journal on current international affairs published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The United States and the European Union have now both announced that they are extending the economic sanctions they first...
The end of the Russian energy weapon (that arguably was never there)
The crisis in Ukraine once again revived the fierce debate about Europe’s dependence on Russian energy resources. Similar to 2006 and 2009, when physical supply disruptions of natural gas took place, this crisis too will spur European integration. Arguably, though unintended, this makes Russian President Putin one of the most explicit...
Russian aggression against Ukraine and the West’s policy response
Introduction Mr. Chairman, Senator Shaheen, distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and the U.S. and West’s policy response. What began as an internal Ukrainian political dispute became a Ukraine-Russia crisis in early 2014. Since then, Moscow has used...
Russia after the Nemtsov murder
Boris Nemtsov’s murder may be a turning point in current Russian history. Unfortunately, it is almost surely not a turn to the better, but one to something bad or to something even worse. This point needs to be made clear from the beginning. It is an illusion to think that this event will lead to anything positive, such as a backlash in the...
