Moscow has advertised Zapad-2017 as a joint Russian-Belarusian military exercise, but it is anything but as it includes features which Russian doctrine requires Moscow maintain exclusive control over and is intended to send a message to...
In the entire saga of “Ukrainian engines” for North Korean missiles, what deserves the most attention is not the article’s publication in the United States, but the reaction to its publication on the part of Ukrainians....
The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in...
Russian forces demonstrated their prowess in the destruction of the opponents of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu says; but ten kinds of Russian weaponry, especially those in high-tech sectors...
By now, it is a well-known story: in the early 1990s, Ukraine surrendered the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal inherited from the collapsed Soviet Union in exchange for security assurances from nuclear weapons states, which Russia...
Last week it was reported that three Russians were arrested on espionage charges. Two Russian citizens and one naturalized US citizen of Russian descent were accused of conspiracy to export military technology to Russia, “to...
Vladimir Putin has revived nuclear brinkmanship as a method of statecraft because the Russian military is so far behind the level of NATO forces, according to Pavel Felgenhauer. In fact, in any clash between the two, the Russian military...
There are two possibilities in Russia today: either Vladimir Putin is in control of events or he is their prisoner, trapped between war and revolution. As bad as the first would be, the way the world has gone to war in the past suggests...
Russian polls, admittedly not the most reliable source, suggest that the more aggressive Vladimir Putin is, the more Russians love and support him regardless of the immediate impact of his policies on their lives, a vicious circle that...
Despite threatening language, Vladimir Putin is not going to start a nuclear war, according to Yuri Shvets, who studied along with him at the KGB’s Andropov Institute. Putin’s only desire is to remain in power for life, he says, and he...
Free independent media is a necessary condition for democracy to function in any country. Censorship, on the other hand, is rampant in all its forms in dictatorships. These definitions may be relevant in a black and white world; in...
