Russia Archive

A Washington Post exposé published Friday revealed new insights into the Obama administration’s real-time reaction to mounting evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The administration’s agonizing efforts to find a commensurate response, while avoiding escalation and the perception it was seeking to influence the election, will be interpreted through a mean-spirited partisan prism. That’s too bad, because there are sober lessons about politics and policymaking that should be considered across the partisan divide. The Obama administration struggled to find appropriate countermeasures to Russian meddling in the final weeks of its time in office, according to the […]

For much of its 16 years of existence, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, has carried perhaps the greatest promise of any multilateral organization in Eurasia. Made up of Russia, China and four of the five Central Asian states—Turkmenistan, characteristically, kept the organization at arm’s-length—the SCO hasn’t just provided a high-level forum for discussing regional counterterrorism efforts. It has offered an outlet for Moscow and Beijing to coordinate their security and, increasingly, economic policies without concerns of Western input. The SCO was never quite a “counterweight to NATO” as some asserted, but it provided the groundwork for cohesion to come. […]

On April 7, an unusual ceremony took place on the edge of a dormant volcano not far from the Nicaraguan capital, Managua. Nicaraguan officials joined Russian representatives for the formal opening of a new Russian satellite-tracking station, located barely 1,000 miles from the United States. Presiding over the ceremony was Laureano Ortega Murillo, a man grown powerful by virtue of his parentage. He is the son of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the president’s wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. The satellite facility, part of Russia’s Glonass network, a global navigation system in the mold of GPS, was given a name […]