Russia and the Asia-Pacific Region

Kim Jong-un is scheduled to visit Moscow this May as one of the Kremlin's numerous guests of honor for the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. This will be his first visit abroad since he succeeded his father Kim Jong-il as…

This eastward drive has been in the making for quite a while. In the second half of the 2000s, Moscow began taking steps to develop the long-neglected Russian Far East, expand economic cooperation with East Asia, and diversify away from…

In the aftermath of Western sanctions on Ukraine, many analysts have predicted that Russia will reorient its economy away from the West, with which it has profitably traded energy in exchange for investment and consumer goods, toward the East, toward…

Seen at least from the perspective of East Asia, the Russian Far East (RFE) is very much the odd man out when it comes to the regional economic miracle of the last generation. There are multiple reasons for the RFE having largely missed this boat, but…

The Eurasia Initiative and the Korean-Russian Gas Pipeline Project   More than a year has passed since the administration of President Park Geun-hye announced the Eurasia Initiative. Both concerns and hopes have been expressed on the subject…

From world-economy to American world-empire    What is the nature of the modern world order? Answers to this question are incalculable many. However, the one provided by Salvatore Babones, a native New Yorker and currently a professor at…

North Korea still remains a mystery to much of the outside world.  It is concealed behind the Iron Curtain, and very few have managed to peak through.  In late 2014, I had an opportunity as a tourist to take a glimpse behind the curtain in an…

On July 3, 1988 Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the US Navy cruiser USS Vincennes.  All 290 people on board were killed.  The civilian airliner was shot down in Iranian airspace while flying a regularly scheduled…

Even under the regime of the strategic partnership China can hardly be named the true advocate of the Russian interests on the Far East and North East Asia. The dynamic of the regional cooperation witnesses on poor development of local cooperation…

Protesters are unarmed. They have no self-defense force. What they have is an umbrella – for the sun, for the rain, and perhaps for the tear gas.   Protesters demand universal suffrage, a genuine one, which is promised by Hong Kong Basic…

According to the classical ‘arms race’ theory by Lewis Richardson, military preparations of one’s side are directly proportional to rival’s potential and inversely – to its own accumulated arsenals. However differential…

As a Scotsman researching the contemporary attempts to develop the Russian Far East, it can often feel like a distant endeavour when reading and writing about events from my office far away in Glasgow. With that in mind I recently spent a few weeks…