Latest posts
Why Saakashvili Lost?
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Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president conceded the defeat of his party at the parliamentary elections. His rival Bidzina Ivanishvili, a money-splashing oligarch who made his billions in Russia and and set up the Georgian Dream party – a motley...
Time for Azerbaijan to open up
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Foreigners normally tiptoe around Azerbaijan. They all want something from the country, be it in the field of energy or security. The EU wants Azerbaijani oil, gas and cooperation over building gas pipelines to Central Asia. The US and Israel value...
Updating Russia’s repressive software
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The massive street protests, which started in December 2011, have proved a very considerable stress-test for Russia’s autocratic political system, built and steered by Putin for over a decade. Russia-watchers in Europe and the US debated how the Kr...
Putinism under Siege: on the nationalist-democratic alliance
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Journal of Democracy has just published a special issue on ‘Putinism under Siege‘ with contributions from Lilia Shevtsova, Ivan Krastev & Stephen Holmes, Denis Volkov, Sharon Wolchik and I. My piece is on The Strange Alliance of Dem...
Russia’s lightweight government
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The last few months saw speculation of two possible behavioural models for Putin. The usual wishful thinkers were hoping for a Putin 2.0 (or maybe 3.0 or even 4.0) who was supposed to have got the message of the street protests and was supposed to en...
Russia in Reverse
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Project Syndicate, 7 May 2012: Vladimir Putin has just been inaugurated for a third term as President of the Russian Federation. But the event’s pageantry could not mask that his return to the presidency, after a four-year stint as Prime Minister,...
EU-Ukraine: from fatigue to irritation
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Ukraine’s favourite foreign policy game is called ‘multi-vectorness’ – a constant process of ‘eschewing choice’ as this recent study explained. For years Ukraine sought to extract concessions and be treated nicely by both Russia a...
Will Yanukovich become a Putin?
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On a recent trip to Ukraine for the Kiev Security Forum I asked some of the Ukrainian analysts whether Yanukovich will manage to become like Putin - a successful authoritarian leader able to retain firm political control for a long time. There is l...
EU is showing its teeth
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It is standard practice to bash Catherine Ashton and how the External Action Service turned out. The story is of an inward looking institution, without having a grand narrative or strategic vision, and little credibility in either EU member states or...
US-Russia: from reset to upset
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A year or so ago, while doing research for the post-BRIC Russia report, I spoke to a US diplomat dealing with Russia about the ‘reset’. He sounded (naturally) very positive about its effectiveness. Among its two key achievements he mentio...
Rogozin’s travails in Moldova
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Brussels might have started to get used to the sharp-tongued former Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin, but Moldova is only in the early stages of doing so. After a stint in Brussels, Rogozin moved back to Moscow last December to be appointed...
Power and weakness in Putin’s Russia
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The result of the Russian presidential election brought two months of euphoria to a shuddering halt. The expectation that Putin would return with a weaker mandate was crushed by his unexpectedly high 63% of support. And even allowing for massive frau...
Putin is weaker, but not weak
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All authoritarian regimes are based on a mix of coercion and inspiration, fear and promise, trickstery and grand narrative. But to be successful, authoritarian leaders need to stand for something. The more convincing their ideational offer, the less...
Russia’s liberal-nationalist cocktail
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The existence of divisions among Russia’s democratic forces is proverbial. But the same can be said of Russian nationalism. Nationalism is a movement that is not only increasingly split between an imperial, expansionist and (sometimes) cosmopolitan...
Is this the beginning of Putin’s end?
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OpenDemocracy.net: The preliminary results from Russia’s parliamentary elections are bad news for the Kremlin. Putin’s pet party, United Russia, got slightly less than 50% and it lost its constitutional majority in the Duma. That translat...
Dealing with a post-BRIC Russia
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I just co-authored a new ECFR report on Dealing with a post-BRIC Russia, some kind of a follow-up to the 2007 Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations. This new report deals with the impact of the economic crisis on Russian foreign policy and Moscow’...
How the eurozone crisis undermines EU power
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It is clear that the Euro-crisis has and will have huge implications for EU foreign policy. A lot depends on what happens in the next months – the solution to the Greek or Italian problems, the contours of a multi-speed Europe and how messy a solut...
Ukraine-Moldova race to EU visa-free regime
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This will probably make boring reading, but for those with some stamina to go through typically unreadable, but important, EU-speak here is a comparison of how Ukraine and Moldova perform on their way towards a visa-free regime with the EU. The asses...
On EU-Russia visa-free travel (Part 2)
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This is a continuation of Part 1 EU member states differ widely not just in the application of visa procedures, but also on how fast the EU should move towards a visa-free regime withRussia. Russia and the EU apparently agreed on a set of common ste...
On EU-Russia visa free travel (Part 1)
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A visa-free regime with the EU is perhaps the one thing that most Russians want most from the EU and is a key priority for Russia’s EU policy. The EU and Russia have agreed on a set of ‘joint steps’ towards a visa-free regime. The issue...
