Diplomacy
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.
Samuel Charap: Why We Will Have to Talk to Russia Anyway
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.
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.
Everything but Institutions: The Four Common Spaces of Russia and Europe
In 2003, Russia and the EU agreed on four common spaces — integration without membership. Prodi’s formula: everything but institutions.
A Weekend at Camp David: The Tieless Diplomacy of 2003
Six months after their quarrel over Iraq, Bush hosted Putin at his private retreat. That said more about the relationship than any communiqué.
The First Call: How Russia Backed America After 9/11
On 11 September 2001, the first leader to reach the White House was the president of Russia. So began the closest period of Moscow–Washington cooperation since the Second World War.
