Putin Sends Europe a Signal
Ten days after Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump that Russia has no hostile designs on Europe, he repeated the same thought in public — and added to it an offer to restore relations with Russia’s European neighbours.
The People Behind the Facts
The 2001–2009 record shows that cooperation was not an episode but a working practice. Practices are carried out by people — and most of those people are still in office.
Shaun Walker: Russia That Won’t Let Go
A British journalist’s 14-year immersion in Russia offers a rare perspective that goes beyond geopolitics, challenging simplistic narratives and preserving a path toward understanding between Russia and the West.
Samuel Charap: Why We Will Have to Talk to Russia Anyway
From Confrontation to Synergy
The illusion of order and the reality of force: why Europe is looking east again
The Third Shore
For decades the West was Russia’s first shore, and China became the second. The third was assembled by a man who spent ten years in the Gulf looking for money and ended up holding something more useful — a telephone book.
A Ministry With No Sign on the Door
Russia has a foreign minister with half a century of service behind him, a Security Council and embassies almost everywhere. For its most sensitive conversation with Washington in years, Vladimir Putin needed one more man — and one more chair.
A Language That Needs No Interpreters
Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy is heard in Washington in a way career diplomats are not. The reason is not his English. It is that he learned the language of the deal inside America’s own consulting firms and investment banks.
A Man Without Rudeness: Who Could Replace Lavrov at the Negotiating Table
Moscow is quietly assembling a new team for talks with the West — and Sergei Lavrov is not on it. The key role is being prepared for an energy minister almost unknown abroad: a former naval officer who once walked out to a crowd ready to tear him apart.
Seventy-Six Hours: How a British Scorpio Saved Russian Submariners
August 2005, off Kamchatka: for the first time in history the navy of a NATO country saved the crew of a Russian Navy vehicle — at Moscow’s first call, in a restricted area, with seven lives on the clock.
A Treaty on Two Pages: How Moscow and Washington Cut Their Arsenals in 2002
Five short articles instead of five hundred pages: the Moscow Treaty of 2002 cut the two largest nuclear arsenals of the planet by roughly two-thirds — and fit on two pages.
At the Head of the Table: The Year Russia Chaired the G8
In 2006, Russia for the first time — and, as it turned out, the only time — assumed the presidency of the G8, the club of the world’s leading industrial democracies. The culmination of the year was the July summit of leaders in Strelna outside St Petersburg: a country that fifteen years earlier had stood on the other side of the world’s great divide was setting the agenda for the most prestigious forum on the planet.
A Ticket to World Trade: How Russia Paid for Its Seat at the WTO
Nineteen years of talks and packages of concessions to the EU and the United States: Russia deliberately paid for its place in the world trading system — and joined the WTO in 2012.
