Karl Marx warned against conjuring up the past to explain the present, but really, we have been somewhere very like the Ukraine before. Benjamin Disraeli stood in the British parliament 150 years ago condemning…
The Russian response to what Moscow perceives as its three main security challenges – Western enlargement, China and terrorism/separatism in the Caucasus – has been expansionism. First in Abkhazia in 2008…
Michael Bradshaw, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
As with the previous Russia-Ukraine gas disputes in 2006 and 2009, how we describe the current stand-off between the two countries is a matter of semantics. Those earlier disputes found solutions based…
Many think we may have recently seen an “earthquake” in European politics but tremors have been with us for a while. While policy makers scramble to make sense of the electorate’s motivations at the ballot…
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), once again saved from potential irrelevance, has come to the fore in the West’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis. In the aftermath of its withdrawal from Afghanistan…
The US$400 billion gas deal signed between Russia’s giant state-owned corporation Gazprom and China last week is 16 times larger than its predessor in the supply of gas to China - a US$25 billion LNG project…
With the outright victory of Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine’s presidential elections on May 25 now confirmed, hopes are running high for a new beginning that will deliver a swift way out of a protracted crisis…
Since the end of the Cold War it has become accepted knowledge that economic ties between the major powers prevent conflict. In a world of globalised production chains and capital flows the general argument…
After ten years of negotiations, Russia’s Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) have announced they have signed a 30-year gas contract. Russia will from the end of this decade supply…
The headline accomplishment of Vladimir Putin’s trip to China is hard to deny: a 30-year deal estimated to be worth US$400 billion for Russia to deliver gas to China. But it isn’t the unqualified win that…
The referendums on independence from Ukraine in Donetsk and Luhansk, defying Putin’s call to postpone, pose deep questions about what “independence” would actually mean – and whether it can actually be…
The Russian State Duma has passed a law that prohibits swearing in public performances. This is just the latest in a series of punitive legislative measures aiming to curb freedom of speech and expression…
Vladimir Putin has called for the postponement of the planned referendum in eastern Ukraine just four days before the vastly pro-Russian provinces were due to vote on secession. The Russian president also…
Ukraine is disintegrating before our eyes, with escalating anarchy, civil war and proxy war with Russia, and dozens killed in Odessa on Friday. Acting President Alexander Turchinov officially declared…
The situation in Eastern Ukraine is turning increasingly violent and fractious, with the mayor of Kharkiv critically wounded by unknown gunmen and kidnapped observers still being held by pro-Russian militias…
Since the very beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, many Western commentators have drawn comparisons between the present situation and pre-WWII Europe, as well as between Hitler and Putin. This has largely…
It is the most serious conflagration since armed pro-Russian forces began taking control of official buildings in the Donbas. At least one anti-government protester is believed to have been shot dead by…
The four-party talks on the crisis in Ukraine have apparently produced a significant breakthrough towards the diffusion of an increasingly dangerous situation. According to a statement released by the…
The German energy giant RWE has begun to “reverse flow” supplies of gas from Europe back to Ukraine via Poland, a process first arranged in 2012, with an agreement to deliver up to 10 billion cubic metres…
Russian media is in turmoil again. After the editor-in-chief of the independent online news website www.lenta.ru was fired, almost 40 journalists and editors left the publication. An independent, privately…