Global warming-induced accessibility has drawn many actors to the Arctic zone, seeking to establish exclusive sovereign rights over its many natural endowments.

While the US may continue to keep its contacts with the Pakistani army and its political leadership and strengthen its presence in Pakistan, can it contain the tide of Islamic radicalism prospering within Pakistan?

The Nord Stream Project will further strengthen Prime Minister Putin’s vision of positioning Russia as a major power in the world.

Russia has considerably enhanced its international position by leveraging Western weaknesses stemming from the unwinnable war in Afghanistan and the adverse impact of the financial crisis, as well as Western dependence in dealing with Iran and North Korea.

The ramifications of an end to dollar-based oil trade would extend far beyond the oil market and would herald the beginning of a new international political order.

In a conference on socio-economic development in Kamchatka Kray in 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that if Russia does not step up the level of activity of its work in the Russian Far East (RFE), it may risk losing territory. The tone of his remarks was ‘unprecedented’ and reminiscent of former President Vladimir Putin’s even more direct and straightforward warning, who observed in 2000 that “if the authorities failed to develop the region, even the indigenous Russian population will mainly be speaking Japanese, Korean and Chinese in a few decades.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is attending a slew of Russian hosted high profile meetings including those of the SCO and BRIC in Yekaterinburg which would be viewed keenly by most international watchers. The SCO, keenly nurtured by Russia and China as an exclusive nucleus, had hitherto excluded those with observer status from its core deliberations. The forum became popular as an embryonic counterpoise to the United States after 2005 when it bluntly issued a quit notice to the US from Central Asia and decided to salvage an assortment of autocrats being ostracized by the West.