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Andrei Piontkovsky
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 3, 2014
Welcome to Vladimir Putin's brave new world
Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions with regard to Ukraine are guided by a single goal — ruling Russia for as long as he lives. This is based entirely on realistic concerns for his personal safety.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 5, 2013
Putin unable to control infighting among elite
The regime established since 2000 by Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to fall apart — perhaps this year — for the same reason that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 2, 2012
The Putin regime's terminal disease
The history of successive authoritarian regimes in Russia reveals a recurring pattern: They do not die from external blows or domestic insurgencies. Instead, they tend to collapse from a strange internal malady — a combination of the elites' encroaching disgust with themselves and a realization that...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 4, 2011
The Caucasian dark circle
The Russian authorities have recently begun showing off the massive security measures being implemented ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. They have good reason to be worried — and not only for the safety of athletes and spectators.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 2, 2010
Is Putin regime fading like its predecessors?
MOSCOW — The history of authoritarian rule in Russia displays a certain depressing regularity. Such regimes rarely perish from external shocks or opposition pressure. As a rule, they die unexpectedly from some internal disease — from irresistible existential disgust at themselves, from their own...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 9, 2009
Who's who in resetting U.S.-Russia relations
MOSCOW — Germany's ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a legend in Russia. He serves Gazprom's interests for a measly couple of million euros a year, sits in on sessions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and writes books about his staunch friendship with "Genosse Wladimir," who, in the not-so-distant...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 3, 2008
Russia's Georgia policy splits the Kremlin
MOSCOW — Dmitry Medvedev inherited the post of president of the Russian Federation from Vladimir Putin, and while Putin moved down the pecking order to become prime minister, speculation has abounded from the start of Medvedev's presidency about an eventual split between Russia's two highest leaders....
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 13, 2008
Ukraine's path will set the course for Russia
MOSCOW — Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 such cycles since the reign of Czar Ivan III.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 3, 2007
'Executioner' looks positively presidential
MOSCOW — In the latest interview given by Andrei Lugovoi, the man Britain wants Russia to extradite for poisoning the dissident Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in London last fall, there was a remarkable moment that has not been fully appreciated. Lugovoi, still rather diffident but...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 29, 2007
It's not the West that should worry Putin
PRAGUE — Last week, Russia and China held joint military maneuvers in the presence of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao. But a new strategic alliance between the two countries is not likely, as it is China that poses the greatest strategic threat to Russia, although...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 4, 2006
Russian elite still see U.S. as bogeyman
WASHINGTON -- An old saying in politics in Moscow is that relations between the United States and Russia are always better when a Republican rules in the White House. We are statesmen, and the Republicans are statesmen. Because we both believe in power, it is easy for the two of us to understand each...

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