A soldier stands guard in Sevastapol, now under Russian control since the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in developments that some fear mark the start of a second Cold War.
EPA/Zurab Kurtsikidze
Bloodshed in Europe and the Middle East against the backdrop of a breakdown in the dialogue between major powers is of enormous concern. The world is on the brink of a new Cold War, some are even saying…
Qatar and Russia have been cleared of corruption in their successful World Cup bids.
EPA/Walter Bieri
FIFA appears to have cleared Russia and Qatar of any wrongdoing in their successful bids to host the 2018 and 2022 world cups. Its report recognises that mistakes were made but downplays the level of improper…
University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker and Michelle Grattan discuss the week in politics including the G20, Russian warships in international waters near Australia, and the tension between…
Leaving Europe behind?
Mikhail Metzel/EPA/Ria Novosti
Michael Bradshaw, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Much has been made of the agreement signed by Moscow and Beijing to get gas flowing from western Siberia to China. There is talk of Russia using the deal to offset its isolation from the west and circumventing…
Russian naval soldiers line up in front of the Russian warship Varyag.
EPA/Yun Suk-Bong
The Defence Department is watching Russian naval vessels that are currently transiting international waters to the north of Australia ahead of the weekend G20 attended by president Vladimir Putin. In the…
Democracy in action in Donetsk.
EPA/Alexander Ermochenko
Much of the world may regard the elections that took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on November 2 as illegitimate, but there appears to be little political will to avert the most likely…
A woman votes from her hospital bed in Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast.
EPA/Sergei Kozlov
Ukraine’s snap parliamentary election on October 26 looks set to return a pro-Western parliament to Kiev – setting the country up for a long and tense winter. And while the elections seem to have gone…
Arsenyi Yatsenyuk needs support from other parties if he is to stay as prime minister.
EPA/Tatyana Zenkovich
Ukrainians have voted for a new parliament. The exit polls, in line with earlier predictions, indicate that the Petro Poroshenko Bloc – which also includes the UDAR party of Kiev’s mayor, former boxing…
Chemical weapons could be making a stealthy comeback.
Andreas Gradin via Shutterstock
On October 26 2002, to end a three-day siege on a theatre in Moscow by Chechen terrorists, Russian security forces used a secret incapacitating chemical agent (ICA) weapon believed to affect the central…
Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, The Bedford Incident, We Dive At Dawn: films based on submariners’ experience reflect the tense and unusual nature of undersea warfare – where it is often not how well…
Oh hey, just picking up a few Kanelbulle on the way home.
Victor Ochieng
Rumours of a Russian submarine hanging around off the coast of Sweden have inspired much Cold War nostalgia. But while there is of course the chance that something fishy is going on, there are many plausible…
The sweet smell of success: Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko.
EPA/Daniel dal Zennaro
The EU-Asia Summit in Milan, Italy, delivered little, if any, tangible progress to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. Relations between Russia and Ukraine’s major European allies remain just a few degrees…
Romanian president welcoming NATO secretary general to Bucharest earlier this year.
EPA
In this fifth part of our series on the countries along Russia’s borders, we turn to south-east Europe. As Romania specialist Tom Gallagher explains, the Ukraine affair has made Bucharest distinctly uneasy…
When Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, was ousted in late February, thousands of outraged and fearful people in southern and eastern cities took to the streets to demonstrate against…
A bizarre one-off exhibition in Moscow was recently announced to celebrate Vladimir Putin’s birthday. An anonymous group of artists contributed paintings depicting the president as the Greek hero Heracles…
The Ukraine crisis caused relations between Russia and the EU to fall to their lowest point since the Cold War. But despite the bickering and outright conflicts, both still need each other: Europe relies…
Time for Brazil to pull in the harvest?
Sweeter Alternative
The Russian ban on the imports of some agricultural products from the US, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway has sparked much debate over the likely impact on American and European farmers…
Thanks to sanctions, prices for fish in Russia have spiked by up to 50%.
Anatoly Maltsev/AAP
When Russia announced counter-sanctions against the European Union, USA, Canada and Australia banning imports of food items from those countries, it was clear there would be imminent consequences. But…
Few bilateral agreements have ever had such turbulent history and implications as the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine. It was former president Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the agreement…
Are pay disputes making Putin sweat?
Sergei Chirikov/EPA
Sarah Ashwin, London School of Economics and Political Science
While Russia faces global disapproval over its role in Ukraine, president Vladimir Putin has trouble brewing at home. A shared sense of nationalist fervour had helped to underpin an approval rating that…