Russia Archive

Turkey and Russia are patching up their troubled relationship. In early August, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in St. Petersburg, in the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders in 10 bitter months since Turkey shot down a Russian jet that was briefly in its airspace last November. But after some symbolic handshakes and photo-ops, what can be expected in concrete terms moving forward between Ankara and Moscow? Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. It’s a safe bet that state-controlled media in Russia will no longer portray Erdogan and his close entourage with […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series inviting authors to identify the biggest priority—whether a threat, risk, opportunity or challenge—facing the international order and U.S. foreign policy today. Just 25 years after winning the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, the United States is facing a very different world than the one many had expected. Instead of a world of relative peace, with no proxy wars in developing countries and no major global geostrategic opponents, there is violence and terrorism around the globe, much of it […]

When the Russian Defense Ministry announced last week that it had started launching bombing raids into Syria from a base inside Iran, the news produced a remarkable reaction, simultaneously angering both the United States and much of Iran. U.S. officials were caught unprepared and were deeply displeased by the news that Tehran and Moscow had decided to intensify their military cooperation. But it wasn’t just the Americans who were angered by the developments. In Iran, many members of parliament were furious to learn that the Russian military machine had positioned some war assets on Iranian soil. It took less than […]

The Moscow Kremlin, a UNESCO world heritage site, has been the seat of Russian tsars, commissars and presidents for the greater part of nine centuries. Its glittering palaces and churches, soaring towers and immense fortress walls have witnessed dramatic turning points in the history of Russia and the world. But if tourists now stream through daily to peruse ancient icons, Romanov family jewels and relics of martial glory, the Kremlin, in its political sense, remains an almost complete mystery to the outside world. That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dismissal last week of his chief of staff and longtime […]

If Vladimir Putin ever loses interest in running Russia, he should set up a diplomatic academy. The British journalist and wit David Frost once defined diplomacy as “the art of letting somebody else have your way.” Through a mix of hard bargaining, guile and simple force, the Russian president has often shown that he knows how to do just that. His skills were on ample display last week. Putin welcomed his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to St. Petersburg to bury their tensions over Syria. He then ignited a new crisis with Kiev over an alleged shoot-out between Ukrainian and […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on a range of countries’ space priorities and programs. The Russian state space corporation Roscosmos announced that it plans to reduce the number of cosmonauts at the International Space Station from three to two in a bid to improve efficiency and reduce costs. In an email interview, Asif Siddiqi, a professor at Fordham University, discussed Russia’s space program. WPR: What are Russia’s space capabilities, in terms of its space-industrial complex, and who are its major international partners, in terms of space diplomacy and commercial ties? Asif Siddiqi: The Russian […]

Geo-economics dominated the agenda of two critical meetings this week: a trilateral economic summit in Baku between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani, followed by a bilateral summit in St. Petersburg between Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While matters of war and peace were also on the agenda—the stalemated conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing fighting in Syria—both summits’ main focus was on ensuring connectivity to the global economy. Let’s start with Iran. In the year since Iran acceded to the terms of the nuclear agreement it signed with the group of world […]

BELGRADE, Serbia—July’s NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, brought the alliance’s leaders to a country where the perceived threat of Russian aggression is particularly acute. It was appropriate, then, that they agreed to beef up NATO’s presence in Central and Eastern Europe, something that Poland and some of its regional partners have been calling for since Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Four battalion-sized battlegroups—fully armed and equipped, with troops from leading NATO members, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and, most importantly, the United States—will deploy on a rotational basis to Poland and the three Baltic […]