Grigol Vashadze: We are Concerned with the Plans of Moscow to Rebuild the USSR
“We are highly concerned about the plans of Moscow to rebuild the Soviet Union”, - declared the Head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia Grigol Vashadze during the interview for DELFI. He has also assessed positively the Chairmanship of Lithuania in the OSCE. According to him, the issues of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have little progress, but it is not yet possible to solve them fundamentally. READ MORE
Russia Threatens to Kill NATO War in Afghanistan
Following the Pakistani government’s recent decision to shut down NATO supply lines into Afghanistan indefinitely, Russian officials upped the ante by subtly threatening to close off northern routes for the occupation if the U.S.-led military alliance refuses to back down on a proposed missile defense system in Europe. According to analysts, such a move by Russia at this point would either spark a new war or force a rapid withdrawal of supply-starved Western forces from the region. READ MORE
Uzbekistan’s Karimov Lashes Out at Putin’s Union
In October, when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared his goal of establishing a Eurasian Union, scorned by some as a “Soviet Union-lite,” the more sycophantic among post-Soviet leaders jumped over each other to sign up. READ MORE
Russian-Georgian Compromise Finally Permits Russia’s WTO Membership
The last remaining hurdle to Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) now appears to have been cleared, as Russia’s chief WTO negotiator, Maxim Medvedekov, announced on November 3 that Moscow has accepted a last-minute membership compromise. Thus, Russia has taken another significant step away from the closed, Soviet type centrally planned economy and toward full integration into the international community. READ MORE
Analysts say Russia could deliver deathblow to Nato
With the Russian threat to cut land routes for supply to Nato troops in Afghanistan, the Afghan battleground may turn into a cold deathtrap for Nato, defence analysts believe. They say that Pakistan should utilise the opportunity for a peaceful and prosperous Pakistan by pulling it out of the American war. READ MORE
No visible results of “economic modernization on the Medvedev track”
Valdai Club.com interview with Sergey Aleksashenko, Macroeconomic Research Director of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics. READ MORE
Statement by the NATO Secretary General on Missile Defence
I have taken note of President Medvedev's statement on missile defence. NATO's missile defence system, which NATO Heads of State and Government agreed to develop last year at the Lisbon Summit, is designed to defend against threats emanating from outside Europe and is not designed to alter the balance of deterrence. READ MORE
Russia Elevates Warning About U.S. Missile-Defense Plan in Europe
Russia will deploy its own missiles and could withdraw from the New Start nuclear arms reduction treaty if the United States moves forward with its plans for a missile-defense system in Europe, President Dmitri A. Medvedev warned on Wednesday. READ MORE
The Cold War Is Really Over Now
As Russia begins to spend $650 billion to modernize their armed forces (by the end of the decade), the prime minister also ordered a dramatic step to permanently cut the Russian military loose from their Cold War past. This requires scrapping over 10 million tons of obsolete weapons (including over 20,000 tanks, over 100,000 other armored vehicles and artillery, hundreds of ships and thousands of aircraft). During the 1990s, this stuff was just left to rot in open fields, remote airbases and dingy corners of ports and naval bases. In the last decade, Russia has spent over half a billion dollars providing some security, and minimal upkeep for this stuff. For a long time, there was the hope that the abandoned weapons might be useful if there was another major war. But there's no one to operate the stuff, as the current Russian armed forces are a fifth the size of the Soviet Union military that used to own all these weapons. Moreover, more than half the equipment to be scrapped is considered obsolete (by Russian standards). Nearly all of it is considered obsolete by Western standards. The rest of the world has picked over this pile of Cold War surplus for the last two decades, and bought what they thought might be useful. That made hardly a dent in the pile of abandoned weapons and equipment. READ MORE
Russia: Rebuilding an Empire While It Can
U.S.-Russian relations seem to have been relatively quiet recently, as there are numerous contradictory views in Washington about the true nature of Russia’s current foreign policy. Doubts remain about the sincerity of the U.S. State Department’s so-called “reset” of relations with Russia — the term used in 2009 when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed a reset button to her Russian counterpart as a symbol of a freeze on escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington. The concern is whether the “reset” is truly a shift in relations between the two former adversaries or simply a respite before relations deteriorate again. READ MORE
