Rusia

Introduction

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put an end to European security as a cooperative project. That project was grounded in the so-called Helsinki Decalogue, a declaration within the 1975 Helsinki Final Act that laid out agreed principles of conduct between the West and the Soviet bloc.1 In the years and decades that followed, European security grew in complexity and scope, especially after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Arms control agreements, institutional arrangements between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia, and the agencies of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gave an ever denser structure to the security order. That order has collapsed. European security needs now to be reimagined and rebuilt during what promises to be a prolonged period of Russian hostility and obstructionism.

The German daily Die Welt has just revealed the existence of a 17-page peace agreement that could have ended the war in Ukraine just weeks after Russia began its invasion. Negotiators from both sides had worked hard on the agreement between February and April 2022, and the original version of this special document has now been made available to the German media. “In March 2022, only a few conditions were missing for the resolution of the conflict, which was to be ‘negotiated by Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky at a summit meeting – which never took place’”.

This is a premium article for paid subscribers that covers the recent trend of declaring the rebirth of ‘maneuver warfare’ as product of the perceived “success” of the Ukrainian operation in Kursk. In the piece I refute these conclusions by explaining how maneuver warfare is in fact a misunderstood, and deliberately misleading, concept which uses outdated combat stereotypes from WWII and beyond in a disingenuous attempt to paper over shifting modern paradigms.

The tragedy in IK-19 – the seizure of employees hostage by convicts and their brutal murder, and then the murder of the invaders themselves – once again stirred up public interest in the topic of prison and gave rise to disputes: how this could happen and what led to it. Exactly the same questions were asked after the June hostage-taking of employees of pre-trial detention center-1 in Rostov-on-Don. Most likely, riots will continue, and the reason for this is a whole range of reasons: unbearable conditions of detention, discrimination against Muslims, lack of prison staff and their low level of training. The situation can only be corrected by completely dismantling the penitentiary system, which directly inherits the Gulag, and creating a new one based on the principles of humanism in its place,” says Anna Karetnikova, a former leading analyst of the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow.

Ukraine has unveiled a new long-range weapon, a mix of drone and missile technology that Kyiv believes will significantly boost its ability to combat Russian military attacks.

Ukrainian promotional material suggested that the “rocket drone”, called Palianytsia, will have a range of 700km, and could bring around 250 Russian military targets within range, opening a new phase of the air war.

Geopolitics is an approach to politics that stresses the features imposed on foreign policy by geographical location, environment, and natural resources. Geopolitics as a discipline contributes to the emphasis on continuity in contemporary political realism. The focal idea of geopolitics is that those who control the Eurasian landmass (Heartland) dominate global politics. Regarding this idea, Ukraine has always been a significant part of Heartland. Therefore, many great powers have been fighting to impose their control over the territory of contemporary Ukraine (or part of it) from the Middle Ages up to today (for instance, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Sweden, Vikings, Ottoman Empire). Nevertheless, Ukraine up to 1923 (the creation of the USSR) was just a geographical notion but not a political-administrative subject.