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Putin is here to stay, whether the West likes it or not
Russia’s new economic model may prove inefficient in the long term, creating a situation in which it is never able to catch up economically with the West. But in the short term, Russia looks more than able to withstand the pressures of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, Putin is here to stay. These are realities that policy makers in the West are going to have to face.
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An endgame in Ukraine may be fast approaching
Even if Ukraine can somehow regain the initiative, it seems very doubtful that it could ever gain the degree of military superiority that it would need to achieve its stated political objective of restoring its 1991 borders. It would be unwise to say that that is impossible, but at present it’s very hard indeed to imagine how it could be done.
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Lenin: a centenary reflection
The cult of personality that the Soviet authorities built around Lenin after his death was fully justified. The revolution of November 1917 really was Lenin’s revolution, and the communist system really was Lenin’s creation. Great impersonal forces matter. But so too does individual agency. The life of Vladimir Lenin proves the point. For good or evil, he changed the path of history.
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Next year in Ukraine, expect the unexpected
War has so many variables that attempting to predict its every twist and turn is somewhat foolish. At some point, the balance of power in any given conflict may shift so overwhelmingly in favour of one side or another that one can safely put one’s head above the parapet and predict the outcome. But in the case of Ukraine, we are far from reaching that point.
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A decade after Euromaidan, Ukraine more fractured than ever
A full reckoning of what transpired during Euromaidan requires one to look at both internal and external factors, namely the divisions that existed within Ukrainian society, the peculiar ideology of Ukraine’s pro-European liberal intelligentsia, and the manner in which Ukraine became a battleground for competing geopolitical interests.
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Shock therapy and Russia’s fatal turn
There are events that at the time seem to portend one thing but years later take on a very different hue. So it is with the dramatic political crisis that erupted in Russia 30 years ago this week, a crisis that ended with tanks of the Russian army blasting the country’s parliament, the Supreme Soviet, into submission.
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Nagorno-Karabakh and the failure of Armenia’s ‘colour revolution’
There was very little to celebrate during this year’s Armenia Independence Day. Just one day earlier, authorities of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh capitulated to Azerbaijan following a brief offensive by the Azerbaijani military. The future of the region’s Armenian population remains uncertain and dreams of an Armenian Karabakh seem to be permanently shattered.
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What the life and death of Yevgeny Prigozhin tells us about modern Russia
The Kremlin has no doubt learnt its lesson, and it is unlikely that it will ever again allow an individual to build a private army that can seriously threaten it. In this respect, while fitting a wider pattern, Yevgeny Prigozhin will probably prove to be a unique figure, destined to fascinate historians for centuries to come.
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Ukraine and the pitfalls of foreign aid
If Western states want to produce better results in Ukraine than they did in Afghanistan, they will have to think a lot more intelligently about what sorts of aid they give and how they deliver it. Simply put, giving money away in large quantities tends to produce perverse incentives that cause people to behave in ways that engender negative results.
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Russian liberalism’s false dawn
Konstantin Bogomolov recently published an article denouncing his one-time ideological allies in Russia’s liberal intelligentsia for their attitude towards the Russian people and the war in Ukraine. Bogomolov was out to provoke, yet beneath its insulting rhetoric, his article contained a germ of truth about the prospects for Russia ever turning into a liberal democratic state.