In a historic announcement on 27th September 2017, the Russian Federation declared the complete destruction of its huge Cold War-era chemical weapons stockpiles.1 The Russian announcement has been greeted with… Continue reading Russia & Chemical Weapons Destruction
In a historic announcement on 27th September 2017, the Russian Federation declared the complete destruction of its huge Cold War-era chemical weapons stockpiles.1 The Russian announcement has been greeted with… Continue reading Russia & Chemical Weapons Destruction
The Imam Shamil Battalion has claimed responsibility for the April 3 metro bombing in St. Petersburg and conveyed that the attack was retaliation against Russia’s targeting of jihadis in Syria, Libya and Chechnya.
What to make of the combination of Trump’s missile strikes in Syria, changes of mind about China and Russia, warnings to North Korea, signals about scaling up military presence in Afghanistan, and outreach to Turkey?
Russia’s efforts to differentiate between the Islamic State and Taliban are a mistake given that both groups share a similar ideology, albeit with slight variations.
The article discusses the changes in Russia’s policy towards Asia, arguing that Russia’s pivot to Asia is a reality, one that is motivated by both political and economic interests. And although that shift is not progressing as quickly as some might want and occasionally encounters difficulties, the process has definitely begun and is in all likelihood irreversible. Only a small, marginal segment of Russian society continues to dream of unity with Europe—which itself has entered a period of severe crisis.
A lot of literature has appeared in recent years on how Russia and China have come to present a common challenge to the US-led world order. But the author of the book Power Politics: How China and Russia Reshape the World, Rob de Wijk, has propounded a different theory to prove a case rather in an ominous way that the old-style power politics has never gone away from the global scene even after the end of the Cold War.
This article contributes to the rich body of literature on Russian security perceptions and analyses how Russian security thinking evolved over the last 20 years. The focus of the article is on how Russian security perspective shifted from the goal of assuring Russian security by integration and cooperation with the West to the idea of Russia’s own separate geo-economic project and the goal of reducing the country’s dependencies on the West. Security in this article is understood both as a military-political and as an economic phenomenon.
