It is no longer possible to influence the European mainstream in any meaningful way, while the “friends of Russia” remain what they are and Russia does not need a Council of Europe to contact them.
Fred Weir: Behind Ukraine-Russia naval tensions, a more brutal economic war
Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is back in the headlines after Russia seized three Ukrainian military vessels and their crews near Crimea, triggering a declaration of martial law in Ukraine and a fresh escalation of tensions between the two formerly friendly neighbors.
William Hartung: America’s Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion
The increase in Pentagon spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire military budget of Russia…
Julian Borger: European diplomats mount last-ditch effort to stop US scrapping INF treaty
European officials are seeking to act as intermediaries between Russia and the US in the hope of salvaging a cold war-era arms control treaty that Donald Trump has threatened to scrap.
War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate by Stephen F. Cohen
In War With Russia? (available November 27) Stephen F. Cohen—the widely acclaimed historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia—gives readers a very different, dissenting narrative of this more dangerous new Cold War from its origins in the 1990s, the actual role of Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Donald Trump’s election and today’s unprecedented Russiagate allegations.
Lev Golinkin: Incentives for Ukraine Crisis
If losing hundreds of soldiers a day wasn’t enough to declare martial law, why are they doing it now?
NYT: Russia-Ukraine Fight Over Narrow Sea Passage Risks Wider War
The Kremlin, along with some Ukrainian opposition figures, called the martial drumbeats echoing from Kiev a domestic political ploy by its embattled president, Petro O. Poroshenko.
Paul Robinson: Poking the Bear
What sort of guy thinks that it is a good idea to deliberately provoke a nuclear-armed power? Answer: the sort of guy who writes for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA)…
Times of Israel: Russia offers to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians
Lavrov says no stability in the region until Palestinian issue resolved; offer comes as sides wait for long-expected launch of Trump peace plan…
NYT: James H. Billington, 89, Dies; Led Library of Congress Into Digital Age
Mr. Billington wrote six books on Russia and revolutionary traditions. His “Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism” (1958) was the first major biography of the 19th-century Russian social critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky. In “The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture” (1966), he examined 1,000 years of intellectual life in Russia. Leonard Shapiro, in The New York Review of Books, called it a “magisterial survey of the past.”
Happy Thanksgiving And Thanks To Our Readers
We’ll return on Monday, Nov 26.
Stephen F. Cohen: Russian Diplomacy Is Winning the New Cold War
Washington’s attempt to “isolate Putin’s Russia” has failed and had the opposite effect.
Al-Monitor: Is Putin getting serious on Libya?
Over the last few weeks, apart from the usual Syrian track, Libya has dominated Russia’s Middle Eastern agenda.
Lyle J. Goldstein: “Great Power Competition” and the Harsh Lessons of World War I
Having mobilized against Austria in August 1914, Czar Nicholas II helped to set in motion the world war that would thoroughly destroy the Russian Empire…
Paul Robinson: Are Masha and The Bear Working for Putin?
It’s said that if you want to win people’s hearts and minds you should ‘get them while they’re young’. It’s a lesson that the Russian state seems to have learnt….
NPR: Pence, Putin And Bolton Have ‘Informal Conversation’ At Asian Summit In Singapore
Vice President Pence and Russian President Vladimir Putin sat next to each other and chatted briefly Thursday at the East Asia Summit in Singapore, in a conversation that also included national security adviser John Bolton.
NYT: Zhores Medvedev, 93, Dissident Scientist Who Felt Moscow’s Boot, Is Dead
With Roy Medvedev, the physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, the author Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and others, Dr. Medvedev was a central figure in the seething intellectual dissidence that exposed, largely through underground literature known as samizdat, the repression of ideas, science and human rights in the Soviet Union.
Kimberley Strassel: Doubling Down on Mueller
What will Democrats (and Jeff Flake) do if the probe finds no collusion evidence?
David Cortright: The Peace Movement Won the INF Treaty. We Must Fight to Preserve It.
In the 1980s, millions of antinuclear activists took to the streets, forcing Western governments to respond to our demands. We can do the same now.
Gordon Hahn: Putin’s Ratings Fall: Back to the Soft Authoritarian Normality of His ‘Sistema’?
Much has been made in Russian and Western media about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declining approval ratings.