President Putin has said Russia could redirect its missiles to target Ukraine if Kyiv joined NATO. According to RFE/RL’s guest authors, that kind of talk is representative of an increasingly truculent foreign policy, which goes largely unchallenged by Russia’s political elite.

An offhand comment by President Vladimir Putin during his recent swing through the North Caucasus should have alerted both Russians and the world of a very serious problem: Besides some speeches and press releases filled with bravado, Moscow has done very little to prepare for the Sochi Olympics.

Thirty percent of the 101,344 newborns in Moscow last year were children of migrant parents from the former Soviet republics and other foreign countries, a share far greater than these groups now form in the city’s population and one that means their percentage of its residents will increase even if …