With the explosion of the Ukraine crisis in spring 2014, Russia made a determined effort to upgrade its strategic partnership with China and achieved instant success. Large-scale economic contracts were signed in a matter of a few months, and the military parades in Moscow and Beijing in respectively May and September 2015, in which the… Read more »
Author: Pavel Baev
Ceasefire as a Fig Leaf for Carnage and Confusion
Just a couple of weeks ago, Aleppo was seen as a crucial battlefield in the Syrian civil war and was compared with Sarajevo as a tragedy of intolerable proportions not only by hard-hitting journalists but also by such responsible politicians as Michael Fallon, UK Defence Secretary. Yet presently, this devastated city is portrayed as the… Read more »
Unfriended: How Russia’s Syria Quagmire is Costing it Middle Eastern Allies
At a time when most Russians were taking a long break from politics until after the Orthodox Christmas on January 7, there has been no respite in Russia’s air operations in Syria, nor in the quarrel with Turkey. Rather than focus on the bread-and-butter issues of making ends meet, Russian policymakers seem to be instead… Read more »
Russian Strategy Seeks to Defy Economic Decline with Military Bravado
President Vladimir Putin concluded 2015 with the approval of a revised National Security Strategy, which defines the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a threat and commits to countering it by securing the unity of Russian society and by building up the country’s defense capabilities. In the course of the past year,… Read more »
Russia Breaks the Partnership with Turkey – but Builds a New One with Iran
De-escalation of the crisis between Russia and Turkey, caused by the first ever air fight between them resulting in a destruction of a Russian Su-24, has suddenly become the hottest issue in global affairs. What has been overshadowed by this clash of military missions and political ambitions is the strengthening of ties between Russia and… Read more »
What is the Russian Military good for?
The Russian military intervention in Syria—launched in a great rush just over a month ago — came as a surprise; perhaps not as shocking as the swift occupation and annexation of Crimea, but a surprise nevertheless. But does Russia’s ability to surprise and to project force in Syria prove, as Garret Campbell claims, that Western… Read more »
Russia’s Syrian Entanglement: Can the West Sit Back and Watch?
For observers who are confined by the boundaries of conventional strategic sense, every day of Russia’s military intervention in Syria brings fresh surprises. Indiscriminate strikes against Turkey-backed and CIA-trained opposition groups (which could not possibly be mistaken for ISIS) were followed by deliberate violations of Turkey’s airspace, and then by the spectacular cruise missile salvo… Read more »
Putin’s Syrian intrigue has yielded zero dividends
Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war appeared to gain momentum every day over the past month, up until President Vladimir Putin’s address to the UN General Assembly on September 28th. The intention behind moving troops and equipment to Syria, while denying these deployments, was quite possibly to build momentum for Putin’s initiative. The… Read more »
How Russia and America make the same mistakes in Syria
Russia’s apparent escalation in Syria is less dramatic than it seems, but it still represents another depressing development in the ongoing nightmare of the Syrian civil war. While it appears no Russian troops are engaged in fighting, the volume of military cargo delivered from Russia to Syria by sea and air has significantly increased in… Read more »
Putin’s Pivot to Asia: Profit-Free, but Problem-Rich
The bilateral meeting in Beijing will be demonstratively cordial but loaded with mutual disappointment. Putin cannot fail to see that his hopes for harvesting rich dividends from closer Russian ties with China have failed to materialize and delivered him to a position of one-sided dependency. Xi, meanwhile, has few doubts about the trajectory of Russia’s… Read more »