...
Judging from the new State Armament Program for 2018-2027, which Putin signed off in December 2017, many of the most ambitious and expensive aerospace and naval weapons programs have effectively been pushed back to the mid-2020s or even beyond 2027.
In Syria, Putin will keep trying to convert the military success of the Russian intervention into political and diplomatic gains, but he will be hampered by the growing Syrian involvement of the United States. Unlike Moscow, Washington has no constructive ...
... issues include allegations of possible Russian connections into European politics, or perhaps also the other way around (we never hear about that). And the Skripal case. All these are secondary and solvable, issues, once the above hard-points are solved.
Syria
Andrey Kortunov:
Russia: the Power Broker in the Middle East?
If it is at all possible to speak of any “winner” in such an ugly civil-war, with perhaps 400,000 dead people and 5 million refugees out of 22 million previous inhabitants, it must ...
... by representatives from more than fifty countries.
The conference speakers included:
Sergey Lavrov
, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, at Special Dialogue session, and
Andrey Kortunov
, RIAC Director General, at plenary session on the future of Syria. Other participants of MED2018 included: Aleksandr Dynkin, RIAC Member, President of IMEMO, RAS Full Member; Alexander Grushko, RIAC Member, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia; Sergey Razov, RIAC Member, Ambassador of the Russian Federation ...
Russia and its partners can arguably win the war, but they cannot win the peace in Syria
Historically, the Middle East has never been a Russia’s strategic priority comparable to Europe, the North-East Pacific or even the Central Asia. Unlike many other major European powers, Russia had no colonial ambitions in the region; it never ...
Today Syrian armed forces lack discipline, centralization, technical and organizational modernization, prestige, and authority and could hardly be called a real army
Army is considered to be one of the most important state institutions which in many ways ...
... Bermann, French Ambassador to Russia.
On November 8, 2018, Andrey Kortunov, RIAC Director General, had a meeting with Sylvie Bermann, French Ambassador to Russia.
The following issues were touched upon in the course of the meeting: various aspects of Syrian Settlement, results of the quadripartite Russia-Turkey-France-Germany summit meeting in Istanbul, options for Syrian political transit, possible areas of cooperation between Russia and France in Syria and in the Middle East.
The meeting also focused ...
On October 26, a delegation of the Syrian High Negotiations Committee headed by Nasr al-Hariri arrived in Moscow and was received at the Russian Foreign Ministry, where it met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and held extensive consultations with Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov ...
... International Affairs Council as part of the project "Security System in the Middle East". This paper covers the issue of complex relations between Russia and Israel in the Middle East. The author analyzes in detail Russia’s role in the Israel-Syria-Iran triangle.
The degree of Iranian presence in Syria, the impact of the nuclear deal in the context of Israeli-Iranian regional confrontation, the role of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement in Russian-Israeli relations are also discussed in the ...
... groups by October 15 (the units of moderate rebels will hold their positions). Free movement and freight carriage is set to be restored on the M4 (Aleppo to Latakia) and M5 (Aleppo to Damascus) roads.
A Step Toward a “Turkish Republic of Northern Syria”?
Ruslan Mamedov:
The Fate of Idlib. Is It Important for Russia?
Ankara has consistently advocated for the preservation of the opposition-controlled de-escalation zone, and it was the efforts of Turkey, and of Erdogan personally, that averted ...
... Ankara. This topic is not only extremely relevant (and will remain so for years to come), but it is also quite voluminous and ambitious. For this reason, the authors propose focusing on the following four main issues: terrorism, nuclear weapons, the Syrian crisis and the security architecture in the Middle East.
At the beginning of 2010, Russia and Turkey had different views on the situation in the region. However, a certain degree of political involvement in the affairs of the Middle East and the ...
