This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
G8 Summits reflect two things: firstly, the ungrounded hopes of the 1990s, and the lack of understanding at that time where Russia was heading; and secondly, the inability of the West to find an alternative forum to interact with Russia—one that is not dependent on the idea of a Russian democracy.
Russia’s declaration of independence and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in reality helped the system of personalized power to survive in a new incarnation.
The causes and nature of the Russian and Turkish protests, as well as the respective regimes’ reactions to them, are strikingly similar.
Everyone seems ready to believe in the Chinese success story and China’s transformation into a new global power. Plenty of evidence indicates that the current enthusiasm for China’s rise and its economic growth are just another delusion that will inevitably end up in a new abrupt awakening.
Putin does not want a collision with the West, but at the same time he wants to contain the West both within and around Russia.
Introducing a normative dimension into the U.S. relationship with the Kremlin will complicate bilateral relations, but it will also help the United States regain the trust and respect of Russia’s pro-Western constituency.
Russia has embarked on its own “pivot” toward China, but it is far from certain that Moscow will find Beijing a comfortable partner.
Western society wants to bring back a normative dimension to foreign policy and stop the export of corruption from authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries to the West.
For the first time, Moscow has said openly that it will limit the West and its influence not only in Russian territory but also in the post-Soviet countries.
While the United States has made mistakes, the current state of Russian-American relations stems mostly from the Kremlin’s creation of imitation democracy and its attempts to exploit the West and anti-Americanism for political survival.
