Free Republic

In any community – a school class, a workshop, an army unit or a prison cell – laymen are tested for strength. Tests may be different: a special procedure of "initiation", a provocation, a physical contest or psychological pressure. In the same way, a goalkeeper in a soccer game is tested at the start with long-distance and precarious blows. Global policy follows similar rules. During recent decades, the West has been systematically testing Moscow leaders for strength. Yury Andropov was tested by a South Korean aircraft illegitimately entering the air territory of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev's personal psychological and political...

So the Footsie has tumbled again. Forgive me for asking, but where are the economists? As the nation approaches recession, an entire profession seems to have vanished over the horizon, like conmen stuffed with cash, and thousands left destitute behind. They said recessions were over. They told politicians to leave things to them and all would be fine. Yet they failed to spot the sub-prime housing crash, and now look at the mess. When I studied economics we were told we would be masters of the universe. Ours was not a dismal but a noble science. It had harnessed the...

Garry Kasparov criticizes Western countries for providing the autocratic regime in Russia with much needed legitimacy and for ignoring violations of basic human rights in Russia ("Russia's Pre-Olympic Nightmare," op-ed, April 26). Mr. Kasparov ignores the truth that there is only so much that other countries can do to encourage Russia to be freer and less autocratic. It is the job of Mr. Kasparov and other leaders of the Russian opposition to invent and promote a social and economic model that combines freedom and governability. They need a model that combines Russian traditions deeply rooted in the country's autocratic history...

The election of Dmitry Medvedev as Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor to be president of Russia provides an opportune moment to initiate a long-overdue review of America's strategy toward Russia. It should now be clear that there is broad-based support in Russia for the direction in which Putin has taken his country; popular discontent with issues such as corruption has not translated into a desire to overturn the system he has created. Despite the excessive degree to which the Kremlin controlled the election process, there is nothing to suggest that Sunday's results invalidate the popular acquiescence with what Putin has wrought...

Hillary Clinton is a highly-educated woman. But this was her response last week when asked to name the front-runner in Russia's presidential election. The New York senator and White House hopeful seems to wear her ignorance of the world's largest country as a badge of honour. She is not alone. In the run-up to today's Russian vote, the Western press has been full of insinuation, slur and downright disinformation about a nation which has risen from the ashes and is now emerging as a global economic giant. I lived in Moscow for several years during the mid-90s - the roughest...

It is not the most obvious home for the savings of the West. A country that routinely sends bombers hurtling towards our air space, that refuses to extradite a suspected murderer, that harasses British officials with trumped-up accusations, that challenges the West on countless foreign policy issues. Oh yes, and one that defaulted on its own debts less than ten years ago. Yet last year Russia was by far the most successful nation in greater Europe in raising new equity investment. Companies there gathered in $29 billion through flotations last year, making the country the biggest recipient of new share...

Among the neon and the glitz of Moscow's car-choked streets, a new hoarding stands out for its stark simplicity. Apart from the colours of the Russian flag, there is no image and its wording is short: "Putin's plan, Russia's victory".

Never one to mince words, Vladimir Putin last week attacked the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. At a ritzy business summit in St Petersburg - the biggest since communism collapsed - the Russian President dismissed the Western-dominated multilateral bodies, set up 50 years ago, as "archaic, awkward and undemocratic". advertisement By urging developing countries to consider new forums for economic cooperation - independent of America, the EU and Japan - Putin tapped into deep seams of resentment, built up over generations, in capital cities from Bogota to Beijing. The ex-KGB judo champion, as ever,...

This Russian risk could yet dwarf our blunder on Iraq Putin's belligerence is the upshot of inept western diplomacy. Following cold war with cold peace may prove a historic error Simon Jenkins Wednesday June 6, 2007 The Guardian Will history tell us we were fools? We worried about the wrong war and made the wrong enemies. In the first decade of the 21st century the leaders of America and Britain allowed themselves to be distracted by a few Islamist bombers and took easy refuge in the politics of fear. They concocted a "war on terror" and went off to fight...

As it feels like a sin, then this must be a confession. I have been in Moscow for four and a half years, reporting on the presidency of Vladimir Putin - its slow erosion of democratic freedoms, its savage disregard for the individual, its petro-dollar arrogance. I've been reflexively critical, due to the obvious truth that the battered Russian people deserve something better. They have done for centuries. But now my time here has come to an end, I need to confess: I am becoming something of a Putin fan. I have witnessed many things that make this stance unsupportable:...

Two days after the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent, should be charged with the murder of his old colleague Alexan-der Litvinenko and demanded that Russia extradite him to face trial in Britain, I bumped into a Russian friend: worldly, pro-western and a fluent English speaker who has travelled dozens of times abroad. I asked him who he thought had ordered the murder of Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic who died of a massive polonium210 dose in London six months ago. My friend had no doubts. “Boris Berezovsky of course,” he said forcefully. It was...

The present crisis in relations between the European Union and Russia is being exaggerated on both sides. Part of the problem is that too many Western commentators still set as their standard for good relations the utterly Western ambition of the early 1990s - a "democratic" Russia that would be completely subservient to the West. Russians too are often still reacting to their experience of humiliation and exploitation in the 1990s with a counterproductive prickliness, arrogance and suspicion. Both sides need to ratchet down their rhetoric and seek pragmatic solutions to the concrete problems dividing them. They also need to...

East and West Ukraine’s squabbling politicians should put their country first Ukraine has the potential to be a thriving, prosperous nation. It has huge tracts of fertile “black earth” that have traditionally produced large grain surpluses. It inherited a well-educated workforce and a high technology base. It has coal reserves and heavy industries that have proved innovative, in some cases, in adapting to a post-Soviet world. Yet Ukraine has consistently failed to live up to its cherished independence. It spent the first decade resisting market reform. It allowed corruption to get a fatal grip on the state apparatus. And its...

Russia Redefines Itself and Its Relations with the West. Dmitri Trenin is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of studies at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Russian foreign policy’s modern-day motives are completely dissimilar to those of the recent Soviet and the more distant czarist past. Whereas the empire was predominantly about Eurasian geopolitics and the Soviet Union promoted a global ideological as well as political project backed up by military power, Russia’s business is Russia itself. Seen from a different angle, Russia’s business is business. In stark contrast to its Soviet past, postimperial Russia...

Gazprom has bought control of a gas pipeline being constructed between Iran and Armenia, in what analysts say is an attempt to protect the European gas market from an unwanted competitor. Last year Gazprom signed an agreement with the Armenian Government, under which Armenia would have to pay only $110 (£58) per cubic metre of gas — about half the market price — in return for Gazprom taking a 45 per cent stake in a joint venture called ArmRosGaz, which controls both Armenia’s domestic gas distribution business and the soon-to-be-completed gas pipeline from Iran. Last weekend, during the visit of...

The former Soviet republic is determined to antagonize Russia, and it thinks the United States has its back. It had better think again. Domestic discontent: The Georgian government is under pressure to resign by opposition groups at home. VANO SHLAMOV/AFP/Getty Images While much of the world has been distracted by crises in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, a dangerous dispute over espionage, energy, and ethnicity has been growing between Russia and its diminutive neighbor Georgia. The relationship, prickly since the breakup of the former Soviet Union, took a sharp turn for the worse in late September, when Georgia arrested four...

Anna Politkovskaya and the Self-Defense of Democracy By Jon Hellevig The writer is a Finnish lawyer who has lived in Moscow for 15 years. He has written the book Expressions and Interpretations (www.hellevig.ru) discussing Russia's social development from the viewpoint of philosophy and judicial philosophy. He is also the author of several books on the Russian tax and labor law. The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has once again induced a surge of anti-Russianism in Finland. Politicians, so-called researchers and media declare that Russian leaders masterminded the murder. Many people cautiously avoid these direct expressions, while being highly critical...

As the presidential succession approaches, Putin’s era surely must be seen as a triumphant restoration of Russia’s integrity and arrival on the global stage. His orderly departure, in line with the constitution, will buttress domestic stability. Unfortunately, Russia’s success in overcoming internal instability is fuelling external tensions with the West, chiefly the United States. This is not only because the emerging Russian “energy superpower” upsets the global balance of power; another, equally important reason is the implicit challenge to prevailing orthodoxy by the spontaneously democratising Russia and China. Accepting Russia and China as equal partners in the democratic project would...

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's potential to regain genuine global power has been discounted by many as a conspiracy theory or a remnant of Cold War mentality. With world leaders transfixed on the rise of China, Russia has been relegated to the category of a spent force. Strategic-forecasting expert and Asia Times Online contributor Joseph Stroupe's new book goes against the tide of Western smugness and makes a brilliant case for sitting up and taking notice of how the Russian bear is opportunistically wrestling to divest the United States of its world hegemony. Notwithstanding disarming public proclamations,...

DEFEAT IS NEVER pleasant, but often it is better to lose than to win. Defeat in the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to Germany and Japan in their thousand years of recorded history. For America, losing in Vietnam was also a blessing in disguise. While defeat seemed to shatter the illusion of an “American century” of global dominance, it was followed by 30 years of almost uninterrupted prosperity, a political renaissance for conservative values and America’s total victory over communism in the Cold War. Such thoughts may not offer much consolation to George Bush, Tony...