... nine urgent and practical recommendations to ensure that we avoid the worst kind of catastrophe: a nuclear incident involving NATO and Russian forces. The measures are focused on preventing accidents, enhancing predictability, and building confidence. These include ... ... transparency for deployments of both missile and missile defense systems.
Perhaps most importantly, this paper recommends that Western and Russian leaders initiate a dialogue focused on strategic stability and nuclear risk reduction. Dialogue should never ...
... «Hypocrisy vs Democracy: Insincerity Destroying the Global Order after the Cold War». About forty experts, journalists and diplomats from Russia, the USA, Bulgaria, Greece, the UK, and Turkey took part in the conference.
The participants discussed the Western and Russian approach to the history of NATO expansion, the promotion of democracy as a geopolitical tool, «Color Revolutions» and «Arab Spring», Ukrainian crisis narrative clash, diplomacy and public policy interaction, the role of hacking in discovering secret agendas,...
... relations with Russia meant that Moscow
could
get the best terms possible for collaborating with the triumphalist West. The West was more than generous in offering
Ru
ssia a “special arrangement” with the European Union and a
se
at at the NATO-Russian Council. Moscow had to play by the Western rules, because these rules were supposed to be clearly
bet
ter for the new, democratic Russia than any other alternative, if
such
an alternative ever existed in the 1990s.
H
owever, this was definitely not how they understood “equality” ...
... Putin and Erdogan, they can look for other alternatives.
What message does this meeting send to the West?
I think that both leaders would like to make a case that the West is not the only game in town, that they have other options, and that if the West shuts its door in front of Putin and Erdogan, they can look for other alternatives.
Do you think Russia can dislodge Turkey as a NATO member?
In Russia there are no allusions about Turkey’s membership in NATO. I don’t think anyone here in Moscow believes that Turkey might leave NATO. But at the same time, everybody knows that Turkey is a very special NATO member. For ...
... held on April 20. Is this a sign of the long-awaited warming of relations? And how can a stable course be established in Russia-NATO relations today?
Obviously, it’s a good sign that Russia has finally been invited, and that the revival of the NATO – Russia Council came from the Western side. I think it was foolish for the meetings to have been suspended just when they were needed at the moment of crisis. It would have been a forum that could have allowed some of the potential dangers to be avoided. However, everybody is saying ...
... how they may be transcended.
In its analysis of the experts’ deliberations, the ELN found fundamentally different interpretations, on both sides, to critical questions relating to the evolution of the European security order; the expansion of NATO; past military interventions; the right to self-determination; and the right to succession.
The nature of the problem:
The dominant western media narrative on the crisis in Russia-West relations is that, through its annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine, Russia has behaved aggressively, has broken international law, and the core policy challenge for the West is therefore how to deter further such Russian ...
... crisis and that business unlikely to resume “as usual” for a long, long time. We cannot even be sure that the peak of the crisis has been reached. The summer of 2016 might be another challenging time for the crippled relationship between Russia and the West. The NATO Summit meeting in Warsaw is likely to lead to some decisions that could cause uproar in the Kremlin. If, by that time, the European Union does not make any positive changes in the sanctions regime (or at least make clear its intention to), the political ...
... the definition of “equal” is elusive. Institutionally, one could argue that Russia has been treated as more than equal: it has been admitted to all the Western organisations it wished to join without necessarily qualifying for them. The West has also done its utmost to link Russia up with the EU and NATO as a like-minded “strategic partner”. But Russia still feels less than equal and humiliated. How come?
The truth seems to be that Russia has never wanted to be treated as an equal partner inside the Western OSCE-based system. Rather, ...
Amidst the increasing risks of a military confrontation between Russia and the West, politicians would better to take into account the experience of religious leaders like Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill.... ... toward Turkey, Washington seems to straddle between increasing cooperation with Russia over Syria and supporting Turkey as a NATO member in its hypothetical military confrontation with Moscow. This leads to another catch-22 problem: The less certain Washington ...
... control over Transnistria. The difference here was that it focused on cooperation with the European Union, rather than with NATO. Ukraine is acting in much the same way, abandoning its non-aligned status and building up its partnership with the West as it seeks to regain control over Donbass and Crimea. We should point out here that Azerbaijan is trying to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict positively without challenging either Russia or the West. Instead, it is trying to balance between them.
In any case, the states involved in ethnic-political conflicts ...
