A capitalist revolution
By Mark Almond, a history lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford (THE GUARDIAN, 07/01/09):
Russia’s energy giant, Gazprom, is at the heart of a new cold war pitting the Kremlin against Washington. In the old cold war, Soviet gas still flowed west at the height of rows between Reagan and Brezhnev - but postcommunist Russia is proving less pliant than the “evil empire”.
Gazprom is at the heart of modern Russia. Its former chairman is the country’s president, and many key executives work part-time in the Kremlin. It is, above all, not only Russia’s biggest company but the world’s biggest energy supplier. Back…
For Russia, A Dark Horizon
By Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Pro et Contra journal who writes a monthly column for The Post (THE WASHINGTON POST, 03/01/09):
Uncertainty is creeping up on Russia. For the first time since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, Moscow confronts the prospect of real political instability. One of Russia’s savviest politicians, Anatoly Chubais, said last month that the likelihood of serious turmoil — economic, social and even political — is 50 percent.
The current crisis is global, and there is no sure way to forecast its length or depth. Such uncertainty would be disturbing in any country but is…
A shield that brings danger
By Mark Seddon (THE GUARDIAN, 03/01/09):
As Russia flexes its muscles, cutting gas supplies to Ukraine in a dispute that is as much about unpaid bills as it is about settling political scores, a small, disused Warsaw Pact airfield in a remote corner of north-west Poland finds itself at the heart of a new conflict between the US and Russia.
Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and Poland a Soviet satellite state, but with the fall of communism both have moved into the western camp - and Redzikowo base was selected by the Bush administration to host the “missile defence shield”, a system designed…
Dealing With Revisionist Russia
By Ronald D. Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, is executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center and is responsible for strategic planning at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The views expressed here are his own (THE WASHINGTON POST, 13/12/08):
Among the foreign policy challenges facing President-elect Barack Obama is the need for a new strategy toward Russia. Moscow is a partner and competitor: We need to work with the Russians on issues such as Iran and counterterrorism, but Moscow today is also a nationalistic revisionist power bent on rolling back Western values and…
Cinco días de guerra y muchos años problemáticos
Por Gennady Martyushev, profesor de la Universidad de la Amistad de los Pueblos de Rusia (RUDN), Moscú (REAL INSTITUTO ELCANO, 10/12/08):
Tema: Este ARI considera la crisis en el Cáucaso Sur y sus consecuencias.
Resumen: Tras el debilitamiento de la Unión Soviética en los años de la Perestroika y su desintegración en 1991, la región del Cáucaso del Sur se convirtió en un foco de crisis político-militar de larga duración. Primero “cruzaron las armas” Armenia y Azerbaiyán en la guerra por Nagorno Karabaj. Las guerras entre Osetia del Sur y Georgia en 1992 y entre Georgia y Abjasia en 1994 fueron también momentos muy…
Russia’s Caribbean Farce
By Anne Applebaum (THE WASHINGTON POST, 02/12/08):
“Nyet! Nyet!” That’s what a Russian bodyguard told a McClatchy news reporter when the latter asked for comment on an incident aboard the Admiral Chabanenko, a Russian destroyer that carried President Dmitry Medvedev to Venezuela last week. Following the pomp, circumstance and 21-gun salute that are mandatory at such meetings, there was, it seems, a bit of a misunderstanding. As Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez boarded the vessel, his beefy bodyguards tried to follow him up the gangplank. They were stopped by their equally beefy Russian counterparts. The Venezuelans, who presumably spoke no Russian, tried to push…
Rusia: del poder ideológico al imperio energético
Por Jesús López-Medel, abogado del Estado y ex presidente de la Comisión de Derechos Humanos y Democracia de la OSCE. Acaba de publicar La larga conquista de la libertad (Quince nuevos Estados tras la URSS a la búsqueda de su identidad), edit. Marcial Pons, 2008 (EL MUNDO, 29/11/08):
La operación de Lukoil sobre Repsol es un claro paradigma de algo notorio y creciente. Revela, en primer lugar, el robustecimiento y expansión de Rusia y la sustitución en este país de la ideología por los intereses energéticos como elemento vertebrador de su intento de volver a ser potencia mundial. Y en segundo…
From Russia With Loathing
By Cathy Young, a contributing editor for Reason magazine and the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 21/11/08):
Shortly before the presidential election, at a discussion about Russian-American relations I attended in Cambridge, Mass., speakers from both countries voiced the hope that the election of Barack Obama would signal the renewal of a beautiful friendship. These hopes were chilled the day after Mr. Obama won. In an address to the Russian Parliament, President Dmitri Medvedev welcomed President-elect Obama with a threat to deploy Russian missiles on the Polish border if the United States…
Mercy That Eludes Medvedev
By Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Pro et Contra journal who writes a monthly column for The Post (THE WASHINGTON POST, 20/11/08):
Nearly 86,000 people have signed a letter asking President Dmitry Medvedev to pardon Svetlana Bakhmina, a former lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s oil company, Yukos. Bakhmina, who is due to give birth within weeks, is in a prison camp in the province of Mordovia, about 400 miles southeast of Moscow.
Bakhmina’s conviction and the entire affair with Yukos and Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man but has been jailed since 2003, have radically corrupted the Russian justice system.…
An end to the Russian chill
By Jonathan Steele (THE GUARDIAN, 12/11/08):
Very few Europeans know the EU has a “security strategy”. Adopted five years ago, the document contains threat assessments ranging from terrorism to nuclear proliferation and organised crime. There are also passages about the need for the EU’s neighbours to be well-governed so that problems don’t spill over into the area, but nothing very specific.
The original draft did not mention Russia once. Europe’s largest country was considered neither a threat nor an asset. The final version remedied that, touching on its role in helping to stabilise the Balkans. The prospect of a “strategic partnership” was held…
Back to the future in the Caspian corridor
By Simon Tisdall (THE GUARDIAN, 30/10/08):
Russia’s efforts to control oil and gas supplies to Europe from the Caspian basin and central Asia could advance significantly at the weekend when the Kremlin hosts a summit meeting of the leaders of long-time south Caucasus rivals Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The talks, convened by President Dmitri Medvedev, are primarily aimed at settling the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, one of the region’s so-called frozen conflicts. In the early 1990s the two neighbours went to war over the enclave, which Azerbaijan regards as sovereign territory and which is currently controlled by ethnic Armenian forces.
Russia’s altruism should obviously be applauded.…
Rising Ambitions, Sinking Population
By Nicholas Eberstadt, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 25/10/08):
Russia is a rising power today, and will be doing a lot more rising in the decades ahead. At least this is what we hear nowadays from pundits, Western intelligence services, presidential candidates and, of course, Russian officials themselves. The Kremlin’s own supreme confidence in this vision of the Russian future was captured nicely by its announcement last year that it expects to be the world’s fifth largest economy in 2020, along with China,…
Rusia, el retorno a la historia
Por Alfonso S. Palomares, periodista (09/10/08):
He escrito como título de este artículo Rusia, el retorno a la historia, no el retorno de la historia. Es un matiz importante, porque Rusia vuelve con la voluntad y la fuerza suficiente para desempeñar un papel notable en el mapa actual del orden mundial, un mapa que se está redefiniendo en un mundo que va hacia una etapa posamericana. Después de la caída del Muro de Berlín, todo el andamiaje imperial ideológico que articulaba la URSS y sus áreas de influencia en el mundo se derrumbó y durante unos años quedó reducido a escombros.…
Building on Common Ground With Russia
By Henry A. Kissinger, secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and George P. Shultz, secretary of state from 1982 to 1989 (THE WASHINGTON POST, 08/10/08):
In 1914, an essentially local issue was seen by so many nations in terms of established fears and frustrations that it became global in scope and led to the First World War. There is no danger of general war today. But there is the risk that a conflict arising out of ancestral passions in the Caucasus will be treated as a metaphor for a larger conflict, threatening the imperative of building a new international order…
The war on coherence
By Martin Woollacott (THE GUARDIAN, 08/10/08):
It is amazing how swiftly a new crisis can knock into perspective one which dominated discussion only a short time before. Just a few weeks ago we were debating whether the west was heading for a new cold war with Russia, or a new Crimean war over Ukraine, or a new Great Game in central Asia. Then the markets began their decline, and Georgia and its possible consequences were swept aside.
But the profound sense of insecurity now felt on both sides of the old east-west divide should allow us to see Russia’s Georgian intervention in a…
Otra visión del conflicto entre Rusia y Georgia
Por Jaime Lamo de Espinosa, ex ministro de UCD y catedrático de la UPM (ABC, 04/10/08):
En las últimas semanas todos hemos seguido con interés y acentuada preocupación las cuestiones relativas a los enfrentamientos entre Georgia y Rusia. Tras las acciones de invasión y conflictos armados en Georgia, Rusia ha desafiado a EE.UU., a la UE y a la OTAN, reconociendo a Osetia del Sur y a Abjasia (la vieja Cólquida de la que nos habla Ulises), y el Mar Negro se ha convertido en centro de enorme actividad naval. Las lupas se han concentrado en Osetia del Sur, poco o nada…
A Rational Russia Policy?
By Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Pro et Contra journal who writes a monthly column for The Post (THE WASHINGTON POST, 04/10/08):
In the first presidential debate, Barack Obama said that he and John McCain “agree for the most part” on issues regarding Russia. But while both were tough on Russia, their consensus, such as it is, is hardly the result of shared clarity on U.S. policy toward Russia. In fact, neither candidate has outlined a policy that would overcome the current confrontations with Moscow and make the world more secure. The big question is how they expect to change…
It’s over, and Putin won
By Jonathan Steele (THE GUARDIAN, 30/09/08):
No corkscrew. That’s the first surprise about Chechnya. Unlike in Baghdad today or Kabul during the Soviet occupation, planes don’t arrive high above the airfield and then dip one wing in a steep and terrifying spiral so as to reduce the risk of ground fire as they land. In Grozny they glide in over woods and villages, apparently confident there are no resistance fighters lurking in wait.
Surprise number two is the amount of reconstruction in the Chechen capital. Five years ago when I last visited Grozny it still looked like the ruins of Dresden or Hiroshima,…
El desplome financiero ruso
Por Anders Aslund, Instituto Peterson de Economía Internacional, autor de La revolución capitalista de Rusia (LA VANGUARDIA, 28/09/08):
El mundo entero se ve afectado por una tremenda crisis financiera, pero Rusia afronta una tormenta descomunal. El mercado ruso de valores está en caída libre, pues ha bajado en picado el 60% desde el 19 de mayo, una pérdida de 900.000 millones de dólares, y el desplome se va acelerando. Por ello es probable que el crecimiento económico de Rusia se reduzca repentina y pronunciadamente.
Tras un largo periodo de prudencia fiscal, Moscú ha dado muestras de extraordinaria ineptitud. Rusia ha disfrutado de un…
Frente a la doctrina Putin
Por André Glucksmann, filósofo francés. Traducción de José Luis Sánchez-Silva (EL PAÍS, 25/09/08):
Hay días, a veces horas, en los que el mundo da un vuelco. Al trastocar los equilibrios entre las potencias y, sobre todo, el equilibrio de ideas y prejuicios en las mentalidades, agosto de 2008 ha abierto uno de esos periodos de crisis. La organización faraónica de los Juegos Olímpicos fue una escenificación de la voluntad de poder de China, que representa uno de los principales desafíos del siglo XXI. La invasión de Georgia anunció al mundo con rudeza que la Rusia imperial y sin fronteras había regresado.…
