... disintegration of nuclear arms control, and the rate at which it happens, depends on who will be in power in the US by the end of the year, and what decisions will be taken by the Kremlin.
From partners to rivals
During his first two terms, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that his country is a European nation, characterised by European values and standards. Those statements have faded today.
US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is quick to point fingers at Russia. Donald Trump, the ...
Should the West be concerned about the Eurasian Economic Union? Is it a disguised attempt to resurrect the Soviet Union?
Does Vladimir Putin want to restore the Soviet Union? Nobody can irrefutably prove that he does not. However, nobody can prove either that Barack Obama does not want to turn the United States into amonarchy or that Bill Bailey has no wish to become the new ...
... real dictatorships, thousands or even tens of thousands disappear, and are tortured or killed. Criticism of the regime can be picked up by the secret police and can lead to the worst of consequences.
This bears no relationship to the regime over which Vladimir Putin presides in Russia. In addition to the aspects of life Daniil mentions, there are other features that distinguish Putin’s Russia from real dictatorships. Daniil doesn’t have to have the slightest worry about making critical ...
... normalize relations with fellow NATO member Turkey at the earliest opportune moment. This will assuredly happen after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan determines the extent of Russian geopolitical concession, if any, during an Aug 9 meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Everyone is playing a game of waiting, or more specifically, a “game of chicken” which incidentally was a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario developed during the Cold War.
Hardly any mainstream Western writer or ...
... backdrop of US-sanctioned neo-Nazi thuggery in Ukraine, and a pandemic rise in anti-Semitism all over Europe.
Did someone say “Never again!”?
Perhaps, the growing chasm between Western rhetoric and reality was a reason why Russian president Vladimir Putin called for the creation of “a non-aligned system of international security to counter global terror” during his May 9 V-Day speech. He warned off the “double standards” and “short-sighted indulgence to those ...
http://www.rferl.org/content/brezhnevs-children/24765431.html
Russia is not the Soviet union. The regime in Russia has little in common with the Soviet regime. To imply that the process of reforming Russia represents a continuation of attempts to reform the Soviet regime, as Whitmore does, distorts reality beyond recognition.
Failures of reform under the Soviet regime were mostly due to features of that regime which have disappeared: (1) the commando-administrative economic system, (2) the ideological...
... into chaos as its institutions – reasonably effective in the last century, but unable to adapt to new-century realities – eroded. Attempts to create a ‘centralized’ or unipolar global system of governance simply failed.
In 2005, Vladimir Putin described the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a major geopolitical catastrophe. The West viewed this statement as evidence of Putin’s nostalgia for the days of Soviet – and with it, Russian – superpower status and ...
... regimes can survive in the long run only if they are supported by society, or at least if there is not sufficient support for resistance.
Has there been a rollback of democracy in Russia? Was Boris Yeltsin more of a democrat than Mikhail Gorbachev or Vladimir Putin? In 1993, Yeltsin illegally dissolved the Supreme Soviet, and shelled the Russian White House, resulting in the deaths of 187 people. He unconstitutionally scrapped the existing constitution, and temporarily banned political opposition....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/opinion/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-russia.html
According to Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin is "still enigmatic, but no longer strategic." Kremlin policy is now "fashioned rather like the music of a jazz group; its continuing improvisation is an attempt to survive the latest crisis." Pavlovsky thinks Putin "lost interest in day-to-day decision making" after the accession of Crimea to Russia when he won the support of more than 80 percent...
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/d%C3%A9tente-plus-how-should-west-deal-russia
“Leslie Gelb speaks for much of the US foreign policy establishment, writes Walter Laquer, “when he says that ... ‘It is totally unrealistic . . . to think that the West can gain desired Russian restraint and cooperation without dealing with Moscow as a great power that possesses real and legitimate interests, especially in its border areas’.”
In contrast to Gelb, Cold Warrior...
