Here is a selection of essays, notebooks and portraits by leading writers on Russia’s history, culture and geopolitics.
The Western alliance has got serious about coordinating its dissemination of intelligence, but it needs to avoid its pitfalls.
Putin took a clear lesson from NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia. His opponents’ failure to understand this stunted their ability to plan for Putin’s most recent invasion.
The Russian army has had its fair share of military disasters with its most recent in Ukraine being a clear product of a system that refuses to accept the truth and only deals in exercising unlimited power.
Shipping arms to Russia’s enemy is not without risk, but examples from history show that it is both possible and the right thing to do.
You can’t separate the Ukrainian – Russian war from the region’s historical struggles over Orthodox Christianity. The Russian state is using every tool in its arsenal, including aggressively clamping down on those who disagree with its stance on the Church.
The atrocities committed against Ukrainians and the fear of further invasions is leading many to call for drastic action to contain Russia. However, should the West put its foot on the first rung of the escalation ladder, it must be willing to climb it.
The warnings were accurate but the West failed to believe them and this made collective deterrent action far less effective.
In the rarefied world of classical music, famous Russians who have yet to criticise their country’s invasion of Ukraine have had global invitations withdrawn. But while many have made no bones about supporting Putin in the past, we should think hard about how to fairly treat artists from aggressive and authoritarian regimes.
Historical influences permeate Russian grand strategy. Operation Barbarossa remains seared into its military’s psyche. This has important consequences for how Euro-Atlantic policymakers should think about the Russia threat.
The Russian president’s ambition to restore his country’s Soviet-era influence is solely in his own interest – at the expense of the nation’s long-term security and prosperity.
Zubok’s mammoth work is a provocative, honest examination of the dissolution of the Soviet empire and Gorbachev’s failings. At the end, it strikes a note that is intriguingly personal and even hopeful.
In 2008, four paths were available to Russia but in 2022, one prevails.
Despite high ideals, dealing with Putin requires some flexibility and an acknowledgement of the nineteenth-century origins of his twenty-first-century threats.
Having practically saved Europe from a communist takeover, Poland’s head of state Joseph Pilsudski’s insistence a century ago on a strong, independent Ukraine, protected by the Western democracies from Russian intimidation and threats, resonates powerfully today.
With the expansions of NATO and the EU infringing on what Russia would consider its strategic depth— Nordic and Balkan nations— the West would be wise to expect a pushback.
From Tsar Alexander II to Putin, Russia’s leading ideology and relationship to Europe has swung between extremes. One constant, however, has remained throughout history: an overriding concern for the geopolitical.
In 1812, the brutally cold Russian winter helped defend Moscow and defeat Napoleon’s army. In 2022, Vladimir Putin will be hoping the ground freezes to allow his conventional forces to engage in fighting.
Traditional geopolitical solutions (accommodation or military containment) are unlikely to work with Putin’s Russia. Instead the West should pursue a unified geo-economic strategy.
If Western states see a new era of great power competition taking shape, this is a conclusion Moscow reached some time ago. The Russian leadership has already been preparing for such a competition for a decade with its military history playing an important role in its preparations.
An authoritarian, expansionist Soviet Union represented the heartland threat Mackinder had long foreseen. But ironically, his insights birthed a strategy for containing that threat—and building the liberal international order we know today.
During the Cold War, the British Joint Intelligence Committee was charged with forecasting the actions of states behind the Iron Curtain and the rest of the world. Its record was patchy – the Brits were repeatedly taken by surprise throughout the 20th century.
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