Renowned Russian academic Sergey Karaganov describes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the latest October Valdai Forum[1] as the “first major and strong call for reinventing Russian ideology for Russia and the world.”[2] Indeed, Putin’s speech can be viewed as an ideological manifesto that tries to put Russia back in the center of the world’s political map.
The Biden administration eased restrictions on aid groups working with the Syrian government in November.
The United Nations has extended authorization to deliver aid from Turkey into Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province for another six months.
Bab al-Hawa is the last Syrian border crossing authorized for direct aid deliveries into parts of the country not controlled by the Syrian government. UN authorizations for cross-border aid into other opposition areas have all lapsed amid Russia’s insistence that aid be directed through Damascus.
Making parallels with the USSR in the 1930s cannot help explain Putin’s Russia.
In late December, a Russian court ruled to shut down Memorial, an organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of people who perished in communist terror. Memorial was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov and fellow Soviet dissidents at the height of Perestroika in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (free speech) made it possible to talk openly about Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s genocidal crimes.
Relying on NATO and the support of its European allies, the United States has trapped Russia in a geopolitical dilemma since the 1950s and has reduced Moscow’s ability to play an influential role in the international community. In order to break this barrier after the annexation of Crimea, Russia has considered Ukraine as the last piece of the puzzle, which will be completed only by a military attack on this country. Ukraine is currently Putin’s most important geopolitical case, as he sees Kyiv as out of Russia’s orbit and seeking closer ties with the West.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his senior aides have repeatedly claimed that Western powers broke promises they made not to expand NATO as the Soviet Union collapsed.
In his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow in December, Putin accused NATO of deceiving Russia by giving assurances in the 1990s that it would not expand “an inch to the East” — promises made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification, the Russian leader said.
The U.S. and France have each condemned the escalation in the Idleb governorate by Russia and the Syrian regime, according to al-Souria Net.
The U.S. and France have condemned the escalation in the Idleb governorate, since the beginning of the new year, by Assad’s forces and Russia.
The Russian demands, which effectively require NATO to commit suicide, are so obviously outrageous and unmeetable that Western analysts are split over interpreting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives. Some say he is using the impossible list of demands as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Others think he is playing a weak hand to try to divide the West and reorder Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor.
The United States and its EU partners stepped up warnings of major consequences if Russia invades Ukraine as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to Washington on January 5 for a meeting dominated by upcoming talks with Russia.
Peacekeepers from a Russian-led regional security alliance will be sent to Kazakhstan to help stabilize the country, the prime minister of Armenia announced on January 5 after an unprecedented wave of unrest in the oil-rich Central Asian nation that was sparked by a fuel price hike.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Facebook that the decision to deploy peacekeepers from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) for a limited period had been taken in response to an appeal from Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to reset relations with Moscow and is planning a face-to-face meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin later this month.
Senior German officials were already scheduled to get together with Russian counterparts in January in a bid to ease geopolitical tensions amid rising alarm that the Kremlin is planning a further military incursion into Ukraine.