The political analyst Boris Mezhuev writes, in Izvestia, about how President Putin’s initiative influences the world political climate. Note that Mezhuev implies that it was Western powers that postponed the latest meeting of the United Nations Security Council. In fact, Russia both called for the meeting and then cancelled it in light of demands from […]
On September 3rd, a somewhat puzzled world awoke to a hyperventilating Russian media. The report making its rounds in the Russian press, translated by The Interpreter, said that Russian radar systems had recorded a ballistic missile launch over the Mediterranean. Eventually, the Israeli government stated that it had conducted a test of a missile defense […]
Vladimir Putin would like Barack Obama to come Russia so they could “talk and discuss the outstanding issues”, but he sees “no disaster”, if that meeting doesn’t happen. This is what the Russian president said in an interview to the “First Channel” and the Associated Press news agency. He explained that the contacts between the […]
To begin with, Barack Obama’s planned summit with Vladimir Putin next month in St. Petersburg, in advance of the upcoming Group of 20 confab in that city, was not really “cancelled,” as has been widely reported. It was “postponed,” a semantic distinction with a difference, even in the style of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger diplomacy which now characterizes […]
On June 17, the G8 Summit was held in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, but President Putin held a series of bilateral meetings in advance, including his first meeting since June 2012 with US President Barack Obama. A month before, the presidents had exchanged messages; diplomats of both countries had said that at this meeting the […]
[The following article describes measures taken by US legislators and adoptive parents to protest against the Dima Yakolev Law, which bans US citizens from adopting Russian children. The concerned parties have asked President Obama to raise the issue when he meets with Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit this week.—Ed.] Lifting the ban on […]
Here are some of the biggest Russia-focused stories from the past week: – In the wake of the Ryan Fogle spy debacle, and the endless debate on Syria, Obama and Putin have reverted to the 19th-century method of writing courier-delivered letters to each other instead of picking up a phone to discuss bilateral relations. According […]
In my early youth, a friend of the family who had consecutively passed through the hell of German and Stalin’s concentration camps gave me A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [by Alexander Solzhenitsyn] to read. Ever since, for many years, I have hungrily read everything I could about Stalin, about the hard years […]
