Russian foreign policy

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Can Russia’s shadow fleet be stopped?

Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s failure to shut that export business down has, so far, been the single most important factor behind Putin’s continued military resilience. Economic sanctions were supposed to be the West’s superpower to punish the Kremlin for invading Ukraine in February 2022. So how come Russia now exports more oil by sea than it did at the beginning of the war?

shadow fleet

Friday

Owen Matthews

Maduro’s capture is mixed news for the Kremlin

For the Kremlin, the US’s snatching of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is a humiliation with a silver lining. True, little more than a year after the precipitous fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia has been shown to be completely hopeless when it comes to keeping its allies in power. In Caracas, US airborne forces breezed past Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, which were part of a $20 billion package of maybe not-so-great Russian military equipment that Moscow sold the Venezuelans. The Kremlin has lost a strategic bridgehead in South America which it could, potentially, have used to disrupt and challenge Washington’s regional hegemony – if Moscow weren’t so committed financially and militarily to its war in Ukraine.

Friday

Owen Matthews

The war in Ukraine is reaching its endgame

Painfully and chaotically, the outline of the peace deal that will eventually end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is emerging as the US leans on Kyiv to abandon key red lines. It may still be months before the guns finally fall silent. But one by one various roadblocks to an eventual agreement are falling away. Crucially, this week Volodymyr Zelensky conceded that his country needed new presidential and parliamentary elections. Moreover, for the first time, he floated the possibility that a Ukrainian military withdrawal from Donbas could be put to a national referendum.  "The Ukrainian people must answer the territorial question," Zelensky told reporters on Thursday. "I say clearly: yes, I support elections.

Friday

Ben Clerkin

Zelensky risks coup or civil war

Kyiv When is the price of peace ever fair? War does not determine who is right, only who is left, Bertrand Russell wisely observed. Very often conflicts come down to a numbers game – and on the numbers Ukraine is losing. Despite losing more soldiers, Russia is winning on the battlefield and unlike Ukraine hasn’t even begun mass mobilization.  Donald Trump’s proposed peace deal won’t turn the clock back on Ukraine's borders, or compensate Ukraine for Russian aggression and war crimes, or even punish Putin personally for starting a horrific and needless war that has claimed as many as 500,000 lives. If anything, the deal rewards him.  But Trump hopes his proposal will draw a line in the sand to stop the relentless bloodshed.

volodymyr zelensky

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Putin thinks time is on his side

Very well then – war. That is the bottom line of Vladimir Putin’s response to Donald Trump’s latest attempts at mediating an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In August, Putin rejected the peace deal that Trump lined up in Alaska. Now, the Kremlin has scuttled the White House’s plan for a summit in Budapest by insisting that Russia’s demands for Ukrainian demilitarization and “de-nazification” remain in force. Clearly, the Russian President still believes that he can win the war on the battlefield – and terrorize Ukraine’s civilians. What is Putin’s plan?

putin

Wednesday

Peter Pomerantsev

Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order

There’s a delicious Russian verb that derives from the criminal underworld: “koshmarit,” literally “to nightmare someone.” It usually denotes how authorities give criminals, or anyone they dislike, so much relentless hassle from so many different angles they bend them to their will. Vladimir Putin, always keen to bring mafia language into politics, was the first Russian statesman to make use of it in public – he once instructed his authorities to stop “nightmaring” the business community. I keep returning to that word when I think of how Putin’s own foreign policy could be restrained to make real the Reaganite slogan that helped Donald Trump win the election: “peace through strength.

nightmaring

Friday

Charles Lipson

Will Putin give peace a chance?

At a summit meeting in Moscow, Ronald Reagan was asked about his basic approach. He famously answered, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.” Vladimir Putin has the same strategy for Ukraine. That is certainly his first response to President Trump’s offer to mediate an end to the war and bring a reluctant Ukraine to the negotiating table. If “we win, they lose” is Putin’s final response, then the war cannot end without Ukraine’s surrender or Russia’s collapse. Putin’s initial reply, filled with his maximalist demands, indicates he is still committed to the conquest of his neighbor, whose independence and sovereignty he has long rejected.

putin

Tuesday

Julius Strauss

What does Putin want from America?

If I had a penny for every time I have been told that Russian president Vladimir Putin only wants respect. Or that he is only interested in eastern Ukraine. Or that if Kyiv is only denied NATO membership, then he will call off the tanks. Well, in the last seven days President Donald Trump has given Putin all this and more. And, though it is still early days, so far the war is showing no sign of slowing. And what has the man who wrote The Art of the Deal asked for in exchange for all this diplomatic largesse? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the only substantive demand Trump has made so far is of the Ukrainians. Last week Washington sent Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv with an extraordinary demand.

Putin