In the first part, I talk about some of the issues raised by a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Sam Charap and Sergei Radchenko for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia whenever they actually happen. In the second I dig into the rise and challenges of Viktor Zolotov, head of the National...

Why are some individuals, parties, even countries still so willing to believe (or at least affect to believe) Putin's nonsense? As a way of trying to explain it, I turn to the intelligence recruitment acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. In the second half, I look at another...

Is Putin's Russia becoming a revolutionary state? A recent article on RT by Dmitry Trenin, once one of the doyens of Russian foreign policy analysis, suggests so, but perhaps doesn't go far enough. I consider Trenin's piece in conjunction with others by Fedor Lukyanov and one Henry Johnston, to...