Eurasia

The Blind Spots of Power For two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been both admired and feared as a shrewd strategist, a strongman who has cemented his rule at home and doggedly advanced Russian interests abroad. Whether suppressing domestic opposition or annexing Crimea, Putin has appeared as an uncompromising …

Tehran recently hosted a regional summit on addressing the dust storms that have ravaged the area over the past two years. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi accused Western powers of playing into the destruction of environment by tapping into the Middle East’s natural resources. Raisi was addressing a regional summit in …

The Turkish, Iranian and Russian leaders are set to meet in Tehran next week amid lingering Turkish threats against Syrian Kurdish groups. Putin and Erdogan will separately discuss the Ukrainian grain crisis. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian leader Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Tehran next week, …

While joining the bloc has its upsides, it will be extremely difficult for Tehran to get full benefits from BRICS without the complete lifting of Western sanctions. Recently, Iran applied to join BRICS, a group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. On a global level, this forum …

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi says that his country will not back down on its positions in the nuclear deal negotiations. In a Cabinet meeting today, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi discussed the ongoing deadlock with the United States over the nuclear negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear deal known formally as …

In banning Russian coal imports from August onward, the European Union has finally broken the “energy taboo” that had beset its discussions of punitive sanctions against Russia for the war in Ukraine. Yet, the coal ban is not going to hit Russia’s economy very hard. With the clock now ticking …

European Union leaders agreed this week to a partial ban on Russian oil imports, overcoming a veto by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But the agreement commits only to banning seaborne imports to the EU by the end of 2022, leaving Russian oil imported by pipeline untouched. Seaborne imports account …

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bellicose speech yesterday, in which he announced that Russia had recognized the independence of two separatist regions of Ukraine and would deploy military forces there as “peacekeepers,” suggests that after months of military posturing and diplomacy, a full-scale invasion may well be at hand. But while …

When the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago, the European security architecture suddenly became uncertain, its future put in play. After all, much of the postwar balance of power in Europe—and the world—had rested on the icy pillars of the Cold War, pillars that in 1991 abruptly melted. It didn’t …

Not long after the commencement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that for China, binding itself tightly to Moscow would do harm to Beijing’s long-term interests. That is because, I wrote, an alliance between a superpower like China and a far less dynamic country like Russia, whose economy is …