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Many western politicians have harbored deep suspicions of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Vladimorovich Putin since he first emerged on the Russian political stage in 1999. This is hardly surprising, given his KGB background, though those with longer historical memories will recall that Yuri Andropov came from the same organization and that the West grudgingly found a way to work with him. While the worst aspects of the Cold War faded away with the peaceful collapse of the USSR in late 1991, twenty years later, trying to figure out Kremlin politics remains as vital an exercise as ever, and the “Putin...

One in three shops are empty in some parts of the UK after an increase in the gap between the best and worst performing towns, a new report shows. Nationally, one in seven shops have remained vacant in the past year and there is unlikely to be a significant improvement because of the economic climate

The Russian and American governments are discussing a bilateral government deal, under which Russian state-controlled oil companies Rosneft and Gazpromneft would supply kerosene directly to the Manas Transit Centre, a crucial logistics hub for the war in Afghanistan. "Ultimately it's in the security interests of Russia for the US to be using this base for its operations in Afghanistan, but under a very, very strict mandate," said Ana Jelenkovic, Central Asia analyst at Eurasia Group. "If Russia is able to monitor the destination of the fuel, it limits the ability of the US to stay there in the base long-term....

Turkey and Russia signed 17 agreements on Wednesday to enhance cooperation in energy and other fields, including pacts to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant and furthering plans for an oil pipeline from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The pipeline would allow Russia to expand its oil exports from the Black Sea, bypassing the Bosporus, whose shipping lines are already at capacity. The deal follows several rounds of agreements between Russia and Turkey in recent years that have helped Russia maintain its dominance of Eurasian energy routes. On his first official visit to Turkey, the Russian president, Dmitri A....

This century has witnessed China's emergence as the main challenger to the superpower status of the United States. In a dramatic fashion, China is beginning to establish its foothold in the highly strategic, energy-rich region of the Middle East by forging strong ties with regional powers and gradually challenging the U.S.-Israeli regional dominance. Thanks to decades of double-digit economic growth and accelerating military modernization, China now has both the need for and the capability of engaging the Middle East. Confined to the sidelines during the Cold War, the Chinese leadership finally found a window of opportunity to enter the regional...

While the international community is fixated on Iran’s nuclear program, China has been steadily expanding its political, economic and strategic ties with Syria. Since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited China in 2004 on the heels of the 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq, there have been increased economic cooperation and more recently, a flurry of high-level exchanges on political and strategic issues. On April 5, while at the 7th Syrian International Oil and Gas Exhibition “SYROIL 2010” to attract local, Arab and foreign investors, Syrian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Sufian al-Allaw told the state-run Xinhua News Agency that he...

Kyrgyzstan's interim government said it will extend the U.S. lease of a key air base by another year. "Kyrgyzstan is extending by one year the validity of the agreement with the United States over the Manas transit center," Omurbek Tekebayev, the deputy leader of the opposition, was quoted as saying by BBC News. Washington is using the air base in Manas to fly troops and equipment in and out of Afghanistan. After the bloody unrest that ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev last week, the U.S. government had been worried that the opposition would throw the Americans out. The move to keep...

Kyrgyzstan may be a landlocked country with a population of less than 5.5 million, but it still looms large in the regional calculations of China, Russia and the United States. The Kyrgyz Republic is the only country to host both a Russian and a US military base. The Russian base at Kant symbolises Moscow’s preeminent security role in the region, while the US base at Manas plays a vital role in sustaining NATO military operations in Afghanistan. And Kyrgyzstan also borders Xinjiang, prompting concerns among Chinese policymakers over infiltration by terrorists and narcotics smuggling into this sensitive province as well...

A recent report of an ancient textile facility, of sorts, is turning heads.[1] Sifting through the debris on a cave floor in the Republic of Georgia, scientists recently discovered evidence that the early cave dwellers processed textiles in the cave. While searching for ancient pollen grains, they found tiny flax fibers in the dirt. Some of these fibers were woven, some were cut, and some were dyed black, gray, turquoise, or pink. They also discovered evidence that these people were processing fur (for clothing) and animal hides. What is surprising about the find is that this was supposedly happening 30,000...

On June 30 the OSCE officially terminated its Mission in Georgia, which had for 17 years monitored the situation in and around South Ossetia. Russia forced the OSCE to close the Mission by vetoing the prolongation of its mandate in the OSCE's Permanent Council. Also on June 30 the U.N. Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), which had for 15 years monitored the situation in and around Abkhazia, began evacuating its personnel, following Russia's veto against that Mission's mandate in the U.N. Security Council (EDM, June 2, 12, 17). OSCE military monitoring officers on patrol in Georgia, in 2008 Moscow wants...

Ahead of NATO’s April 2-4 Bucharest Summit, the alliance is preoccupied with maintaining the principles on which it interacts with aspirant countries. The core principles may be summed up as: the open door, membership action plans on the road to that open door, merit-based assessment of aspirant countries, and no external inputs into Allied decisions on membership or membership prospects. The alliance as a whole is alert to the risk of compromising those principles in the event that Membership Action Plans (MAPs) are denied to Georgia and Ukraine in a manner perceived as deferring to Russia. Even Germany, the leading...

Russia and China: The Mechanics of an Anti-American Alliance Fall 2006 - Number 11 Alexandr Nemets Conventional wisdom has it that China’s expanding military capabilities, and Beijing’s growing regional ambitions, will one day soon pose a challenge to the United States in Asia. Likewise, Russia under Vladimir Putin has shed any ambiguity about its post-Cold War direction, become increasingly assertive, powerful and anti-American. Yet perhaps the greatest threat to U.S. interests and objectives in the years ahead will not come from Beijing or Moscow alone, but from the ominous alliance that is emerging between the two. It is a partnership...

Rarely has Russia's leadership been so widely reviled in the West, yet rarely has the West needed Russia's friendship more. The most obvious reason the West needs Russia is the latter's abundance of natural resources, which Western governments have for decades assumed would always be at the disposal of their industries. Indeed, Europe has almost learned to take its dependence for granted, relying on its good fortune that, for the past three centuries, the Russian elite has identified itself wholeheartedly with European culture and values. The occasional voices that arose to call for a reorientation eastward to Siberia, or southward...

December 28, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Gazprom and Minsk have managed to agree on one thing -- Belarus's asking price of $2.5 billion for a 50 percent stake in the state pipeline operator Beltranshaz. Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov has confirmed that concession to Belarus: "We have agreed to the most comfortable conditions for Belarus," Kupriyanov said on December 27. "We want to obtain 50 percent [of Beltranshaz], not control over it, and we are [offering] a price that is even higher than the market one."

Jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky is looking at a possible 15-year prison term in connection with a money-laundering inquiry. The prison term would come on top of the eight years he is already serving. Prosecutors on Wednesday questioned Khodorkovsky as part of their inquiry. "Khodorkovsky is suspected of stealing oil revenues from Yukos subsidiary firms and then laundering these funds by donating them to Open Russia," Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Yury Shmidt, said by telephone from the regional capital, Chita.

President Vladimir Putin insists he wants Russia to be a respected member of the community of nations. Why, then, does he keep doing things that remind us of the bad old days of the USSR? Russia talks a good game about wanting more trade and investment with the West. But then it goes and does something crazy: seizing the assets of Shell Oil off Sakhalin Island. ... Russia never had the technology to fully exploit its oil and gas reserves; it needed outside expertise. Which explains why Shell was in Sakhalin, one of Russia's most promising offshore oil sites. But...

Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells, evidence obtained by the BBC suggests. Disturbing video footage of post-mortem examinations on dismembered tiny bodies raises serious questions about what happened to them. Ukraine has become the self-styled stem cell capital of the world. There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases. But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies. Wall of silence The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of...

PRAGUE, December 8, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- On December 8, 1991, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine gathered at a site in the Belarusian forest of Belavezhskaya Pushcha to declare that the Soviet Union was dead. In its place, they announced the formation of a new alliance, the Commonwealth of Independent States. For those who lived through it, it was a heady but uncertain time. Hopes of social change and political freedom mixed with fears of economic freefall and the disintegration of state institutions. But what about those with no memory of that time? RFE/RL spoke to young people born...

PRAGUE, November 9, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Russian media today are predicting a chill in U.S.-Russia ties following the results of the November 7 U.S. elections, which appeared to hand both chambers of Congress to the opposition Democrats and have led to the surprise resignation of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Many Russian newspapers predict the changes to the U.S. Congress will mean increased criticism of Russia's human rights standards, and a deterioration in cooperation on foreign-policy issues like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. RFE/RL correspondent Claire Bigg spoke to Aleksandr Golts, a political and defense expert for the Moscow-based "Yezhednevny...

November 10, 2006 -- Russia and the United States have reached an agreement in principle on bilateral terms for Moscow's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO).