Moscow is on the march. After invading Georgia and establishing Russia’s dominance over the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Mr. Putin is now bent on dismembering Ukraine. The Russian strongman has made no secret of his contempt for Kiev’s independence. At a NATO summit in April, he told President Bush that Ukraine is [...]

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Foreign investors are fleeing, bank lending is down, and growth is slowing in Russia. By Jason Bush more…

Crimean Power Struggle: Russia and Ukraine Jockey in the Black Sea
Rise of the Rest: The Challenges of the New World Order
‘Russia’s Energy Weapon’: German-US Tensions Grow Over Baltic Pipeline
Oil, Interrupted: Europe Grapples with Russia-Georgia Woes

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The naval fleets of Russia and Ukraine share the port at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Some in Russia would like the Ukrainian city to return to the Russian fold. Many fear that a spark here could quickly lead to a larger conflagration. By Walter Mayr more…

Photo Gallery: Russia’s Last Black Sea Bastion
Rise of the [...]

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He’s an ethnic nationalist with a mystical sense of Russian destiny. Cold and pragmatic, he won’t play by the world’s rules.
Does this ruthless, focused leader have a weakness? Yes: his temper. Despite his icy demeanor, Putin’s combustible. He takes rebuffs personally and can act impulsively — and destructively. Instead of lulling Europeans into an ever-greater [...]

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has issued a stark warning he will send troops back into Georgia should NATO invite the south Caucasus country to join, but this time he promised the consequences “could be much worse,” according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
At a news conference, Medvedev said having Georgia join the North [...]

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Russia’s increasing belligerency is of great concern to U.S. and NATO leaders. The invasion of Georgia comes on the heels of such actions as the resumption of nuclear-armed bomber patrols off the U.S. coast, the planting of the Russian flag under the Arctic ice, the manipulation of natural gas supplies to the Ukraine and a [...]

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To understand just how unsettling Russia’s invasion of Georgia is to American foreign policy, it’s useful to highlight a short exchange that Senator McCain’s leading foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann had with a reporter from Radio Free Europe in April.
Scheunemann was asked whether the U.S. should be willing to “trade off” Georgia and Ukraine’s NATO [...]

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The spread of freedom and the West standing up to it.
The Russian state’s open hostility, not only toward Georgia but also toward Ukraine and the Baltic states, is, in this sense, partly ideological. Genuine elections have taken place in all these countries; people who have not been preselected by the ruling oligarchy sometimes gain wealth [...]

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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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Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 of these cycles since the reign of Tsar Ivan III.
In the past, however, the Kremlin’s sharp anti-Western turns were reversed — usually out [...]

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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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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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Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Friday urged fellow leaders to diversify eastern Europe’s energy supply routes away from Russia and not succumb to ‘energy blackmail.’
Speaking to six other heads of state at an energy summit in Kiev, Yushchenko said his country could play a greater role as a supply route from energy-rich Caspian Sea states [...]

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Twenty-two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, work is under way on a colossal new shelter to cover the ruins and deadly radioactive contents of the exploded Soviet-era power plant.
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The explosion at reactor No. 4 on April 26, 1986 was the world’s worst nuclear accident, spewing radiation over a large swath of the former Soviet [...]

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Since the removal of the Soviet threat, NATO’s goal in Europe has changed from defending its eastern borders to pushing those boundaries as far east as possible. In 2004, the alliance executed the biggest expansion in its history, to include seven new members: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia — all formerly part [...]

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These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people.
I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase [...]

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The long-term presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Ukrainian territory touches a sensitive nerve in a country that is asserting its independence from Russia by seeking NATO membership.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet (RBSF) has its main base in Sevastopol, a city in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, in southern Ukraine.
Many Atlanticists believe [...]

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Vladimir Putin made dire warnings against Ukraine on Tuesday over membership in NATO, even as he ended a dispute with Ukraine over the price of natural gas. The power games between Putin and the West over influence in former Soviet satellites reminds critics — still — of the Cold War. more…

Pipeline Project: Putin Puts Europe In A [...]

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Russia has threatened to target the Ukraine with nuclear warheads if the former Soviet republic joins Nato and accepts the deployment of United States anti-missile defences on its territory.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia warned Ukraine’s leader Viktor Yushchenko of “retaliatory actions” should his country join the Western alliance during a joint press conference in Moscow.
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