Valdai Club 1: Panel on Russian Military Reform

I spent last week in Moscow at the inaugural meeting of the Valdai Club’s military section. I will have a number of posts this week with my impressions of the meetings. I’ll start today with a brief summary of the overall schedule and a discussion of the first substantive panel, which was on developments in [...]

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Russian navy shifts strategic focus with China in mind

I’m off to Russia again this week, for a conference on the Russian military. I’ll blog about the conference next week, but in the meantime, here’s an Oxford Analytica brief I wrote on Russian naval missions. This is from February 2011. – SUBJECT: Navy rearmament and the implications for its missions and strategy. SIGNIFICANCE: Recent [...]

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A strategy for military reform

In early 2011, the Russian Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR) released a massive report entitled “Discovering the Future: Strategy-2012.” The idea is to develop an agenda for Russia’s development during the next presidential term. The section on security issues and the military was authored by Alexander Golts and Mikhail Krasnov. Golts appears to be the [...]

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US-Russian Cooperation in the Caspian: An Opportunity Worth Pursuing

For the United States, the strategic importance of the Caspian region has increased dramatically in recent years. The Caspian littoral states have come to provide an important set of opportunities for the U.S. in a strategically significant region. Now, however, they face a range of significant security threats in the region, which have resulted from [...]

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Russia’s Arctic Security Strategy

The following article has just appeared in the Russian Analytical Digest.[1] During most of the late 20th century, the Arctic region was primarily a zone of military interests, used by both NATO and Soviet strategic forces as bases for their nuclear submarines and as testing grounds for intercontinental ballistic missiles. With the end of the Cold [...]

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Ten Years of BlackSeaFor: A Partial Assessment

This spring marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of BlackSeaFor, which was set up back in 2001 in order to enhance peace and stability in the Black Sea region, improve relations among the Black Sea littoral states and increase regional cooperation. To further this mission, BlackSeaFor conducts biannual naval exercises that include ships from [...]

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Russian Politics and Law, March 2011 Table of Contents

Volume 49 Number 2 / March-April 2011 of Russian Politics and Law is now available on the mesharpe.metapress.com web site at http://mesharpe.metapress.com. Contents after the cut. This issue contains: The Nature of the Russian Political System: Editor’s Introduction p.3 Dmitry Gorenburg The Nature of “Putinism” p.7 Lev Gudkov The Political Mechanics of the Russian Regime: Substitutes [...]

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The Nature of the Russian Political System: Editor’s Introduction

As we get closer to the 2012 Russian presidential elections and the prospect of the potential return of President Putin, Russian scholars have increasingly focused on thinking about the nature of Russia’s political system and speculating on how it might develop in the future. In the next two issues, we explore these questions. The articles [...]

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Is the Mistral deal in danger of collapse?

In today’s Moscow Times, Ruslan Pukhov (the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow and the publisher of the Moscow Defense Brief journal) has an excellent analysis of the problems that may stymie the Russian purchase of the Mistral ships from France. He argues that the disagreement is primarily about the transfer [...]

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How was bin Laden’s death received in Russia?

Russian reaction to the news that U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden was somewhat muted because of the May Day holiday, which continued into Monday, May 2. The Kremlin limited itself to a brief statement congratulating the United States for its success and noting that Russians unfortunately have first-hand experience in dealing with international [...]

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