Dear Amar,
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/...
Your article fleshes out several aspects of the Syria crisis of which I was not much aware. I'm tired of the simplistic one- and two-dimensional explanations that we get from our mass media. For example: The Russians don't want to lose their naval base in Tartus. They don't want to let their ally, Assad, fall. They don't want to lose income from weapons sales to Syria. They want to embarass the Americans, etc. Your...
Syria and especially Ukraine appear to be inflection points in the trajectory of Russian foreign policy
Ivan Timofeev, who participated in the annual meeting of Valdai International Discussion Club is giving a talk on the outline of future Russian foreign policy.
After the Ukraine crisis and military intervention in Syria, the key ...
On October 14, the White House dismissed a proposal by President Putin to send Prime Minister Medvedev to the United States to discuss military cooperation in Syria. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the proposal a sign of "desperation." Said Earnest: "We're not interested in doing that, as long as Russia is not willing to make a constructive contribution to our counter- effort," <http://www.rferl.org/content/white-...>
But where is the evidence of Russian...
Ukraine's Increasing Polarization and the Western Challenge, by Eugene Chausovsky 11 March 2014 http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/ukraines-increasing-polarization-and-western-challenge#axzz38mfJD9Bl
George Friedman, The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq 24 June, 2014 http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/united-states-has-unfinished-business-ukraine-and-iraq#axzz38mfJD9Bl
Friedman and Chausovsky, along with many others, force the Ukrainian crisis excessively into a geopolitical...
The Soviet Union’s sunset years hardly felt like an innocent age to those who lived through them, but to recall the hopes and aspirations of that era is to rue the naiveties of those days. “A common European house” was how President Mikhail Gorbachev pictured the continent’s future; “a Europe whole and free”, in the words of George HW Bush, his American counterpart. But, as the tussle over Ukraine has shown, Russia and the west are rivals once again. The ceasefire...
... the EU in a wide variety of spheres. Efforts to oppose integration in Eurasia, meanwhile, are unsound in substance and counterproductive politically, given the historical trade links and political goals common to all CIS members.
Does this mean that Russian foreign policy is rigidly determined by the world's highly integrated nature and that we have no freedom of choice? Not at all.
Metaphorically speaking, a rational person won't struggle over the choice between acknowledging or not acknowledging ...