In reality, the conflict between Russia and Georgia is not just about Abkhazia but about Russia’s lingering resentment at what it regards as Western encirclement. Following the end of the Cold war and demise of the Warsaw Pact, Russia believed it had an assurance from Nato and the West that there would be no expansion [...]

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In recent years, Moscow started to think that it could most easily express its dissatisfaction with Western politics by resorting to old Cold war cliches. The Kremlin does not like that Ukraine and Georgia want to join NATO, therefore it claimed that Western military bases will inevitably be built in those countries and that they [...]

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Over the past eight years, starting with the rise of Mr Putin, Russia has recovered both its confidence and its capability. But to do what?
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The key to Russia’s success is linking political and economic issues, and playing one country off against another. If the EU wants to help Georgia, Russia uses Greece to block it. [...]

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Nicolas Sarkozy is nothing if not ambitious. The French president wants to overhaul his country’s economic and military policies, redefine how Europe thinks about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and collective defense, and set things right in several former French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Sarkozy’s latest project melds some of [...]

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If Finland, Russia’s immediate neighbour, feels twitchy enough to think about joining NATO, that may ignite debate in Sweden. That could in turn foster closer co-operation among all five Nordic countries—though even full NATO members are not always good at this.
Read Me…

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A “new world order” cannot be based on “an Anglo-Saxon pattern that some have tried to establish for the rest of the world,” Lavrov said. It would involve doing away with “the Cold war architecture for the security of Europe.”
He proposed a European Security Conference to bring together the United States, Russia, the European Union [...]

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Russia wants Georgia, its former Soviet possession, to stay out of NATO so badly it is risking armed conflict to support the breakaway region of Abkhazia. In the past two months, Russia has sent almost 1,000 troops into Abkhazia, established direct economic ties with it and downed an unmanned Georgian spy plane.
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Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.
The Cold war may be over, but you would never know it from NATO’s April meeting in Bucharest. The alliance approved membership for Croatia and Albania, and only French and German opposition prevented the Bush administration from adding [...]

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President Sarkozy seeks a rapprochement with NATO while strengthening the European Union’s defense dimension. France’s allies, including the United States and Germany, have welcomed this. But Sarkozy faces strong domestic resistance to changing France’s relationship to NATO. By Leo Michel more…

The Third World War: Why NATO Troops Can’t Deliver Peace in Afghanistan
Trans-Atlantic Identity Crisis: NATO [...]

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Others were driven by the uncertainty of the future. The posture Russia chooses to adopt in its efforts to reclaim its former status, in particular, was mentioned as cause for concern. The deterioration of Russian military capacity and the unlikelihood of a direct conflict make it more of a destabilizing factor than a threat. Nevertheless, [...]

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The U.S. representative to NATO said Monday she would like to see Russia as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“Speaking as a mom and as a strategist and a lifetime student and friend of the Russian people, I would love to live in a world where Russia wanted to be a NATO member [...]

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The Atlantic alliance is in limbo: There is no consensus among its members on a range of key issues. No one wants to pay the bills or contribute more troops. Is NATO a Cold war relic that has lost its relevance? Or does today’s array of security challenges make it more important than ever?
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Russia was accused yesterday of stoking separatist tensions as part of a campaign to prevent the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine joining Nato.
Georgia said that Russia was arming rebels in the breakaway region of Abkhazia to provoke a war and scupper its bid to join the military alliance.
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Moscow also angered Ukraine by [...]

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This report was published on Nov. 13, 1997. It shows that Russia was helping Iran with its missile development program.
From the article:
By providing advanced missile technology to the radical Islamic regime in Tehran, Russia is threatening vital U.S. interests and violating an international arms control agreement. Its assistance to Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor [...]

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More and more Russian military men switch to Western military. We’re not just talking about French foreign legion, but also about Estonian army. It turns out that Tallinn touts Russian draftees by giving them freely Estonian citizenship.
More and more Russians try to get no in Russian, but into foreign army. Its’ not a secret that [...]

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Analysts are actively debating the possible outcomes of an armed conflict between Georgia and the self-proclaimed republic of Abkhazia, which seceded from Georgia in 1992.
Without looking into the most pessimistic scenarios envisioning a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO, let’s try to predict the possible outcomes of a Georgian-Abkhazian conflict.
In late 2007 the Georgian armed [...]

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LONDON: The US risks starting a new Cold war by proposing to build its missile shield in central and eastern Europe, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned in comments published in London yesterday.
Washington claims the anti-missile system it wants to base in Poland and the Czech Republic is aimed solely at countering the threat from [...]

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NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has warned that more nations may follow the examples of Iran and North Korea and work to develop nuclear weapons.
He said Monday that the possibility that Syria could be building a weapons-capable nuclear reactor showed that NATO must find an answer to ballistic missile threats.
“The nuclear ambitions of Iran [...]

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The Topol-M series, which has the NATO reporting designation of SS-27, has a range of around 7,000 miles and the ability to evade any future U.S. missile defense system deployed in central Europe.
The system is reportedly capable of withstanding a direct hit from laser weapons, electromagnetic pulse and a nuclear blast, the report said.
Solovtsov said [...]

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Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, is stepping into the vortex of the superpowers’ race for global pre-eminence. Here are some of the challenges he faces.
NATO AND MISSILES
NATO’s readiness to give Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership has exacerbated Kremlin suspicions that the West’s goal is to surround and weaken Russia. Lately tensions have escalated along Russia’s [...]

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The “moment of truth” has come for Europe to resist hardliners in Russia who are bent on stopping the spread of democracy in the former Soviet Union, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said on Thursday.
Moscow has sparked an international crisis by ordering extra troops and equipment to Abkhazia, a Black Sea province which threw off [...]

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