Exercising feminist curiosity: how Ukraine women are involved in the conflict and how Putin’s nationalist fever dream is a patriarchal one.
Sunflower seeds and Molotov cocktails
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Russia
The Many Faces of Trump Foreign Policy
It won't be too long before we start to get a better understanding of what foreign policy in a Trump Administration will actually look like. It's useful to keep in mind that current rhetoric is no...
#RussiansDidit
Putin’s annual press conference is a chance for regular citizens to spend 3 hours in a great and rich Russia, where everything is in order and Putin is capable of installing presidents in foreign...
The Russians Are Coming (for your language too)
Gone are the good old days when I had to explain what the word ‘yarki’ means to my friends and colleagues (for the record, ‘colorful’, not ‘brilliant’). Now I will have to clarify the complexities...
More Russia Posts
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong… (updated)
No matter what their take on culpability for the Russo-Georgian War, almost all commentators in the west agree that Russia emerged the undisputed victor: Georgia lies prostrate at its feet, a divided NATO issues empty and inconsequential threats against it, and no one has any doubt that the Russian Bear is back. A number of observers note that Russia lost the "propaganda war," but present that fact as more of a consolation prize than anything else.But what if we've all got it wrong? After a brief conversation today, I can see a rather different interpretation. If events play out in their...
Georgia: The Reuters “Bullet Points” and some of my own (updated)
I knew that CNN did this, but so, apparently does Reuters. Who needs blog updates?* Reuters reporter sees Russian tanks leave Georgian city* Russia says additional "peacekeeping" posts needed* NATO calls on Russia to respect ceasefire and pull out* Moscow says Georgia planning attacks inside RussiaAnyway, there are growing signs of ethnic cleansing and targeted violence against Georgians, not only in South Ossetia but also in cities such as Gori. NPR reported this morning that the Russians did eventually move to protect civilians against South Ossetian looters, but that Georgian villages in...
When Worlds Collide
With all of the excellent almost-real-time analysis going on around here lately, I haven't felt the need to chime in myself; my Duck colleagues are doing an excellent job, and they are more up-to-date on the specifics of Russian-Georgian relations and the various on-the-ground issues. So I've been a consumer like the rest of our readers, watching events unfold out of the corner of one eye as I struggle to get some book chapters cranked out before the academic year starts up again. I told myself that I'd only post if I had anything distinctive to add.And now I think I do. Not about the...
A Conflict of position and maneuver (updated … and updated again … with photoshop-esque graphic)
Russia, NATO, Georgia, the Abkhaians... everyone, sensing the final draw-down of the immediate crisis, is trying to, variously, make sense of what it all means, maximize their long-term position, or just stay afloat.One can only imagine how this is playing out within the Russian military. By this point, just about everyone is saying the same thing: the Russian air force underperformed.Early reports indicate that pipelines running through Tbilisi from the Caspian Sea oil fields were targeted unsuccessfully by the Russian air force, which employed front-line Tu-22M3 bombers in the conflict....
Recent analytic content on the Duck: a guide
I thought that it would be a good idea to provide a consolidated list of:1. Older Duck posts on the conflict with significant "original" analytic content2. Recent non-Georgia posts that might have gotten lost in all the updating.So here it is:• Cold War III? The state of Russian-US relations (Email)• Speaking of Genocide (Charli)• Human Rights Watch Takes Aim at Russia and Pot-Shots at the U.S. Over Cluster Munitions (Charli)• International Justice: Miscarriages and Misconstruals (Chrarli)• Russia-Georgia conflict: what the current evidence suggests (Dan)• Georgia: Thoughts on what it might...
Cold War III? The state of Russian-US relations
I received a very thoughtful email on the current chill in US-Russian relations:The timing certainly makes a clear statement, but haven't we basically told the Russians that we are deploying these systems whether they like it or not? At least in public statements, it hasn't seemed like this was even remotely negotiable.Given Lavrov's comments Thursday about WTO membership, it seems like they are willing to write this stuff off--we weren't going to budge anyway, so what's the difference? The carrot can only be snatched out of reach so many times before the donkey decides he's never going to...
Caucasians behaving badly: Saturday news aggregation
I have to say that the latest news is not encouraging. Forced labor in South Ossetia? The Georgians claiming, among other accusations that Abkhazians have seized 13 villages and a hydroelectric plant in Georgia proper?In other words, it ain't over until the Red Army Choir sings.On a lighter note, Pravda reports that Saakashvili "clearly" had a nervous breakdown on TV because he "ate his tie." Ahh, the influence of YouTube. (Video below the fold; warning, you may need to manually advance the time slider.)Despite such efforts, as Vadim Nikitin writes at the Russian Foreign Policy Blog, the...
At last!
A major newspaper (other than the Christian Science Monitor) in the United States has published a sensible and relatively evenhanded OP-ED on Russia-Georgia. Michael Dobbs:t didn't take long for the "Putin is Hitler" analogies to start following the eruption of the ugly little war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia. Neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia with the Nazi grab of the Sudetenland in 1938. President Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said that the Russian...