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After the April NATO-Russia summit in Bucharest, Russia's government promised to fight NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine in every possible way. Yet the issue at hand was not membership, but rather issuing Kyiv and Tbilisi Membership Action Plans (MAPs) whose implementation NATO would review before deciding about membership. Russia's storm of threats and attacks against Ukraine, Georgia, and NATO prompted Germany to block the granting of these MAPs. But Moscow's hysteria (no other word fits) led NATO to declare that Ukraine and Georgia will be members and gave the meeting of foreign ministers scheduled for December the power to...

The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran. That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are...

Russia showcased its military might and youthful new president to the world Friday, as heavy tanks and missile launchers rumbled across Red Square in a Victory In a nationally broadcast speech two days after his inauguration, President Dmitry Medvedev avoided the bellicose rhetoric of his mentor and predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who drew parallels between United States and Nazi Germany during last year's parade. However, in his speech marking victory over Adolf Hitler's Germany, the 42-year-old Medvedev said the history of World War II demonstrated that military conflicts are rooted in "irresponsible ambitions which prevail over interests of nations and entire...

You do not really know what arrogance is until you have seen tanks come snarling down your street. The sight does something to the heart and the mind that nothing else has the power to do. I know this because tanks did come down my Moscow street with evil intent one bright August morning in 1991, the spearhead of a KGB putsch that nobody then knew would fail. We - my Russian neighbours and I - stood unspeaking in helpless knots at the side of the road as the monsters, barrels slanting romantically in the sun, tore up the road...

MOSCOW (AP) — When Boris Yeltsin left the Kremlin eight years ago, he gave Vladimir Putin the pen he had used to sign important documents and decrees, a gesture symbolizing the transfer of power to Russia's new president. When Putin left the Kremlin, he took the pen with him. Putin, who became prime minister Thursday, has signaled that he intends to remain Russia's principal leader, at least in the short term — and possibly much longer. He is keeping the trappings of his presidency and many of its powers as well. It was not always meant to be this way....

Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War. With Dmitry Medvedev due to be inaugurated today as Russian president, the Soviet Union's last leader said that the White House's claims of peaceful intentions towards its former superpower rival could no longer be trusted. Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia. From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia's deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war "very close," a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday. Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the "foreign minister" of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia. "We literally have to avert war," Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels. Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: "Very close, because we know Russians...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia's deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war "very close", a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday. Separately, in comments certain to fan rising tension between Moscow and Tbilisi, the "foreign minister" of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia. "We literally have to avert war," Temur Iakobashvili, a Georgian State Minister, told reporters in Brussels. Asked how close to such a war the situation was, he replied: "Very close, because we know Russians...

Russia's display of heavy weapons in this year's Victory Day parade in Moscow is "not sabre-rattling", President Vladimir Putin insists. Tanks and intercontinental missiles are to be paraded for the first time since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The outgoing Russian leader said that Friday's parade to mark the end of World War II would demonstrate Russia's growing defence capabilities. "We do not threaten anyone and do not intend to do so," he said. A dress rehearsal for the parade was conducted on Monday. Mr Putin is stepping down as president on 7 May to be replaced...

Ideology matters again. The big development of recent years is the rise not only of great powers but also of the great-power autocracies of Russia and China. True realism about the international scene begins with understanding how this unanticipated shift will shape our world. Many believe that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But Chinese and Russian rulers, like past rulers of autocracies, do have a set of beliefs that guide their domestic and foreign policies. They believe in the virtues...

Chinese nuclear submarines prompt 'new Cold War' warning By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent Last Updated: 5:30PM BST 02/05/2008 Tensions in the Far East could reach "Cold War levels" defence analysts warned, following evidence that China had secretly developed a major nuclear submarine base. Satellite photographs passed to The Daily Telegraph this week showed that the secret base at Sanya on Hainan island will house up to 20 of the latest 094 Jin-class nuclear ballistic submarines that could be capable of firing anti-satellite missiles and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The construction showed that China was “ramping up its operational capability” and developing...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has endured years of criticism over its human rights record but now it is hitting back by setting up watchdogs in New York and Paris to challenge the West over its own rights record. Natalya Narochnitskaya, one of the leaders of the project, said the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation will offer a fresh perspective on human rights that is not hostage to the political agenda of Western governments. "American policy under the flag of democracy and human rights in actual fact is a Trotskyist permanent revolution which serves the aim of giving them (political) mastery,"...

With the fall of communism and the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, the West believed democracy had won. How wrong it was, says the neocon and foreign policy adviser to John McCain. He warns the forces of freedom are losing ground as the autocracies of Russia and China reassert themselves as world powers In recent years, as the great autocracies of Russia and China have risen and the radical Islamists have waged their struggle, the liberal world has been divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. The great democracies have squabbled and jostled for the moral high...

Why Does Ahmadinejad Want Russian Troops in Iran? 25/04/2008 By Amir Taheri Why is the leadership in Tehran anxious to give Russia the right to land troops in Iran? The question is not fanciful. The Islamic Republic is conducting a devious campaign to prepare public opinion for that eventuality. The message is relayed through deliberately vague terms that diplomats understand immediately while the general public does not. The device is to revive two treaties that most students of Iranian history thought were dead and buried long ago. The first is the 1921 Treaty that the government of Sayyed Ziauddin Tabatabai,...

A second American aircraft carrier steamed into the Persian Gulf Tuesday as the Pentagon ordered military commanders to develop new options for attacking Iran. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the "increasingly hostile role" Iran is playing in Iraq - smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Venezuelan armed forces occupied 32 sugar plantations Thursday, the latest in a wave of takeovers that some say is a bid by President Hugo Chavez to regain political momentum and reverse his recent slide in the polls. The farms in Lara state were taken over by army units at the request of the Chavez government's National Land Institute, or INTI. The institute in recent years has handled the takeover of thousands of acres of farmland and turned them over to worker cooperatives. The government last week said it would seize privately owned cement manufacturers, and Wednesday it...

Moscow - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that NATO's willingness to enlarge eastward had 'nothing positive' about it and followed 'a Cold War logic.' Lavrov had tough words for the alliance's decision last week to keep its doors open to former Soviet states wishing to join. 'We will do everything in our power to prevent Georgia and Ukraine's acceptance into NATO,' Lavrov was quoted as saying Tuesday in an interview with radio station Ekho Moskvy. Russia views NATO's expansion eastward as a betrayal and an effort by Western states to persevere in the Cold War policy of containment....

If you had to define “globalisation” with an image, what would it be? A container ship from China stuffed with toys and T-shirts? A programmer tapping at a keyboard in Bangalore? A plane circling gloomily over Heathrow airport? Most people’s pictures of globalisation are to do with economics, technology and business. But before markets, modems and manufacturers could do their work, political changes had to take place. The foundations of the globalised business world are political – and so are the biggest threats to the system. The challenge to the globalisation consensus comes from below. Political elites in the US,...

Report Cites Increase in Attacks on Military Recruiting Centers Wednesday, March 26, 2008 By Melissa Underwood Shattered windows and bomb scares are growing threats for recruiters working to find young men and women to join the U.S. military, according to a new report that claims attacks on military recruiting stations are on the rise. The report, issued by a not-for-profit group that supports members of the military, calls the incidents — including the spray-painting of graffiti — "attacks," and claims there have been more than 50 since March 2003. "The peace protesters are not peaceful," said Catherine Moy, executive director...

Stepping up a campaign to join a Eurasian security and economic bloc dominated by Russia and China, Iran is looking for allies within the organization to back its bid, but political analysts doubt it will succeed. Late last month, Iran secured the support of one of the members of the six-country Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Tajikistan, which later this year will host the bloc's annual summit. Established in its current form in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) comprises Russia, China, and four Central Asian states -- Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Together they control a large proportion of the non-Arab...

There’s always the watershed moment. That moment that guarantees war in the future and it becomes just a matter of time before it happens. No war is ever caused by the obvious act that triggers it. The Sarajevo bullet fired on June 28, 1914 didn’t cause World War I. Hitler invading Poland on September 1, 1939 didn’t cause World War II. Because wars are about taking care of “unfinished business”, we are faced with the prospect of a third world war. If that comes, the independence of Kosovo will be the watershed moment. Pandora’s box, despite all the warnings issued,...

What is it about Russia that drives the Anglo-American world mad? Soviet communism collapses, the empire is relinquished. Then come the wild hopes and failures of the 1990s—including the 1993 half-coup and the tank assault on Russia's legislature, the results-adjusted referendum on a new constitution (still in force), the dubious privatisations, the war in Chechnya and the financial default in 1998. But after all that, in December 1999 Boris Yeltsin apologises, steps down early—and names his prime minister and former secret police chief Vladimir Putin as acting president. To widespread consternation, Yeltsin predicts that the obscure spy is the man...

PRAGUE (Thomson Financial) - Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev attacked US plans to site an anti-missile system in central and eastern Europe, saying that it was aimed at Russia and China and not Iran. 'You believe that (the system) will be used against Iran? No, the whole system is aimed against Russia and China,' Gorbachev said in an interview broadcast by Czech public television today. He dismissed sustained US statements that the anti-missile system is aimed exclusively at countering the threat from 'rogue states' such as Iran. 'The US radar is a serious question and the Czech government has been...

Prague - Russia in the era of outgoing President Vladimir Putin is a new-style dictatorship ruled by KGB spies and mobsters, former Czech president Vaclav Havel said in a Wednesday interview with Lidove Noviny daily. "The era of president Putin brought a new type of dictatorship, dangerous in its inconspicuous fashion," said the Soviet-era dissident playwright turned Czech Republic's long-time post-communist president. The Putin rule has been a combination of "the worse from both communism and capitalism," Havel said. "A grouping, simply said, of KGBs and mafiosi has ascended to power." He said that Russia seems to have a difficulty...

On Feb. 11, the United States announced that four individuals were arrested on charges of conducting espionage operations for the Chinese against American interests. One employee, who worked for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, was hours from meeting his Chinese intelligence service contact when he was arrested. I could not disagree more. While there is little broad agreement about U.S. defense and trade policy toward China, there is widespread agreement among security experts that China is systematically seeking classified information about the United States. These arrests were not isolated incidents, but rather just public examples of a long string of...

Look out for Mother Russia. The nation that emerged from the ruins of communism is not as dangerous to the world or as nasty to its own people as the old Soviet Union. But a new book by Edward Lucas, former Moscow bureau chief of The Economist, warns that Vladimir Putin and the ex-KGB thugs running oil-rich Russia have stifled the freedom of their citizens and turned their country into a menacing bully. I recently talked to Lucas in London by phone about his book The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West. Q: What is...

Frequent flying by Russian strategic bombers near American airspace — drawing U.S. fighter jets- has military officials at this base near Colorado Springs on guard and angling for greater openness and cooperation. While odds are low that these increasing Russian forays will cause a catastrophe, "there's more of a risk of something accidental happening," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Monday after meeting here with homeland defense commanders. "We will clearly watch this evolution," Mullen said of Russia's flights - not detected in such numbers since the Cold War. "We've got good military-to-military relations with the Russians....

It is hardly a conservative policy to support the establishment of an Islamist state on the European continent, turn a blind eye to the well-documented persecution of an ancient Christian community, engage in a Woodrow Wilson-style passion for nation building and follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton. Yet that is what the United States has done by recognizing the independence of Kosovo. Kosovo is the ancient heartland of the Serbian people going back to the dawn of their history. It certainly had a Muslim ethnic Albanian majority before Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright bombed Belgrade back...

Specialist Robert Terrio and his wife, Kary, thought they had avoided a dangerous deployment a few months ago when he learned that his Missouri National Guard unit would do a tour in Kosovo instead of Iraq or Afghanistan. "There's a certain amount of relief that we weren't being deployed to an active war zone,'' Robert Terrio said. Then, last month, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, a move Serbia refused to recognize. Suddenly, Kosovo started to look a little more dicey. Demonstrators torched the U.S. Embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, mobs attacked several United Nations border posts, and gun...

The scale of the "new Cold War" between Britain and Russia was laid bare last night when it was revealed that Gordon Brown has not had a single conversation with President Vladimir Putin since his first day in Downing Street. The Foreign Office is said to be alarmed at the lack of contact between the two leaders, which has fallen to levels last seen in the pre-glasnost era of Margaret Thatcher and Leonid Brezhnev. Diplomatic sources say that the first – and last – direct contact between the men was on June 27 last year, when the Russian leader rang...

By the third week of January this year, we heard Russia announce that it would not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in battle, that it would resume this May parading tanks and missiles through Red Square in the Soviet fashion, that it would reestablish the application of double jeopardy in criminal trials and would file criminal charges against former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, in order to stop him from running for president in March. Back in April of 2006, when I started little blog called La Russophobe with the goal of warning the world that, in...

China said Tuesday its defence spending would jump 17.6 percent this year but insisted the rise was moderate, amid a flare-up in tensions with the United States over Beijing's growing military muscle. Military spending in 2008 will reach 417.8 billion yuan (57.2 billion dollars at the end-2007 exchange rate), a spokesman for China's parliament told reporters ahead of the legislature's annual session beginning Wednesday. As Jiang Enzhu announced the figures, he also renewed a warning to rival Taiwan that its plans for a March 22 referendum on United Nations membership was putting an already uneasy peace between the two sides...

Venezuela's justice minister declared that war "has already begun." Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa called his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, a "baldfaced liar." Uribe demanded the International Criminal Court try Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for genocide. President Bush accused Chavez of "provocative maneuvers." Colombia said documents found at the base showed rebels wanted to make a radioactive dirty bomb. But the documents it shared with reporters didn't support the allegation, indicating instead that the rebels were trying to buy uranium to resell at a profit. Uribe said Chavez should be prosecuted for allegedly financing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Uribe...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Russian bomber aircraft approached a U.S. aircraft carrier off the Korean coast on Wednesday and was intercepted by American fighter jets -- the second such incident in less than a month, U.S. defense officials said. According to the U.S. officials, a Russian bomber came within three to five nautical miles and flew 2,000 feet (610 meters) above the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships. Two U.S. F/A-18 fighters were launched to intercept the Russian aircraft and escort it out of the area, according to one defense official. Russian bombers over the past year have...

Russian bomber aircraft approached a US aircraft carrier off the Korean coast on Wednesday and was intercepted by American fighter jets -- the second such incident in less than a month, US defense officials said. According to the US officials, a Russian bomber came within three to five nautical miles and flew 2,000 feet above the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships. Two US F-18 fighters were launched to intercept the Russian aircraft and escort it out of the area, according to one defense official. (Reuters)

Putin, Medvedev pledge unified pathBy JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer 1 minute ago MOSCOW - Dmitry Medvedev, the man Vladimir Putin hand-picked to be his successor, scored a crushing victory in Russia's presidential elections Sunday, a result that was long anticipated but that still raises questions about who will run this resurgent global power. With ballots from over half of Russia's electoral precincts counted, Medvedev had 68.2 percent, according to the Central Election Commission. Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov had nearly 20 percent, it said. Medvedev was on course to win about 70 percent of the vote, according to a...

The US Navy is sending three warships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea in a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon...... Another military officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because full details about the ship movements are not yet public, said the USS Cole is headed for patrol in the eastern Mediterranean and that the USS Nassau, an amphibious warship, would be joining it shortly. The officer said a third ship would go later, but he did not identify it by name.

US: Venezuela purchases four times more weapons than it needs The two senior US intelligence chiefs Wednesday said Venezuela has purchased up to four times the number of weapons it needs for domestic defense, with a goal to destabilize countries in the region that are close to the United States, such as Colombia. J. Michael McDonnell, US National Security Director, and lieutenant general Michael D. Maples, the Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), make their comments about Venezuela's buildup of arms during a hearing at the US Senate Armed Services Committee, AP reported. McDonnell said Venezuela was now...

US-India defence deal 'to counter China' By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi and Richard Spencer, China Correspondent Last Updated: 3:37am GMT 26/02/2008 America is attempting to forge a strategic alliance with India with a series of arms deals as the South Asian nation bolsters its defences against China. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, will arrive in New Delhi to strike a common position on Beijing with the Indian government. Indian army tank India has become one of the largest buyers of defence equipment His arrival comes as New Delhi decides whether the US firms Lockheed Martin and Boeing, or...

Beijing - If current rumors in India are true, the United States could end up providing India what its traditional Russian arms supplier has long promised to provide, but so far failed to deliver. In the process the United States could deliver a severe blow to Russia's defense industry, adding another item to the long list of grievances Russian officialdom has lodged against the United States. During the Cold War, India was famously the largest and most powerful of the "non-aligned" nations that stayed out of the East v. West confrontation. At the same time, however, India enjoyed close relations...

Vladimir Putin has delivered perhaps his most menacing tirade against the West yet, repeating threats to train nuclear missiles on Europe and warning of unspecified retalliation if Kosovo declared independence. Adressing his last press conference as Russian president, Mr Putin mounted a defiant display that demonstrated more emphatically than ever the widening gulf between Moscow and its former Cold War rivals. In a vintage performance, the former KGB spy laced almost five hours of invective with crude insults, threats and amonitions often expressed in the argot of the Russian street. Reserving his greatest ire for the United States, which he...

MOSCOW -Russia has taken delivery of its first new-generation nuclear submarine since the fall of the Soviet Union, the submarine's builder said yesterday. The Yuri Dolgoruky was launched at Russia's secretive Sevmash shipyard in the Arctic town of Severodvinsk on Tuesday night. "The atomic submarine Yuri Dolgoruky was launched into the water," Sevmash said. Named after a Slavic prince who helped to defend Moscow, the Borei-class (Arctic Wind) submarine can carry 107 sailors for 100 days without surfacing.

Russia is waging a "little Cold War" against its Baltic neighbors, while luring Western Europe into energy deals that will later allow Moscow to extend its political influence through intimidation, a former president of Lithuania warned yesterday. Russia has returned to its historical aggressive behavior, harboring "deep suspicions of the rest of the world" and dashing the "short-lived hopes that Russia would become a democracy" after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vytautas Landsbergis said at the National Press Club. Now a conservative member of the European Parliament, Mr. Landsbergis predicted that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters aim...

BEIJING (AFP) - China on Thursday told the United States to drop its Cold War attitude after US authorities arrested four people this week on charges of spying for the Chinese. "The so-called accusation against China on the issue of espionage is totally groundless," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said when asked to comment on Monday's arrests.

As ANN reported, the Tu-95 flew over the Nimitz at about 2,000 feet while another bomber flew nearby February 9 -- but both were escorted by US aircraft and the event did not even warrant a call to "general quarters" or for crews to man battle stations, Navy Adm. Gary Roughead said. "I did not consider it to be provocative," he told reporters at a Pentagon news conference Tuesday. "We knew they were coming. We saw them coming. We detected them at the appropriate time. We launched our alert aircraft, who escorted the Russian aircraft. From my perspective, everything worked...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12, 2008 – A weekend incident in which a Russian bomber “buzzed” the Nimitz battle group in the Pacific raises concerns about Russia’s intent and the message it was meant to send, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress today. Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright told the Senate Budget Committee the encounter -- in which U.S. F/A-18 jets scrambled to intercept a Russian Tu-95 Bear bomber as it flew at 2,000 feet above the battle group -- ended without incident but raises big questions. U.S. forces detected two Russian Tu-95s early Feb. 9 as...

<p>Russian bomber aircraft approached a US Aircraft carrier in the Pacific on Saturday and were intercepted by American fighter jets, a US Defense official said on Monday.</p>

Russia's foreign minister called U.S. plans to build a global missile defense shield an example of "imperial thinking," and suggested in comments published Thursday that Washington was using the system to try to encircle Russia. Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that elements of the missile defense system "exist or will be built in Alaska, California, northeast Asia." "If we look at a map, it's clear that all of it is concentrating around our borders," he was quoted as saying. "Most likely in the near future, we are going to hear about hundreds, and...

Russian Air Force bomber briefly intrudes into Japanese airspace TOKYO, Feb. 9 KYODO A Russian Air Force bomber briefly intruded into Japanese airspace off the southern part of the Izu Island chain on Saturday morning, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said. Japan filed a strong protest via the Russian Embassy in Tokyo over the Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber's intrusion which lasted about three minutes from 7:30 a.m., the ministry said. Russia, however, denied the aircraft had entered Japanese airspace, Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported. Alexander Drobyshevsky, head of the Russian Air Force information service, told Itar-Tass that strategic aircraft missions were...

MOSCOW, Feb. 8 - President Vladimir Putin said Friday that "a new arms race has been unleashed in the world" as the United States moves forward with a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Russia will field new weapons in response, he said, dismissing American assurances that the missile system is not directed against Russia as nothing more than "diplomatic cover." "It's not our fault. We didn't start it ... funneling multibillions of dollars into developing weapons systems," Putin declared in what may be his final major address before he leaves the Kremlin after presidential elections March 2, to become...