­The reshuffle in the Russian government and Kremlin administration didn’t affect Russia’s foreign policy team at all. Minister Sergei Lavrov has been re-appointed as many expected. Dmitri Medvedev’s and Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs advisors Sergei Prihodko and Yuri Ushakov followed their bosses and changed places. Lavrov is already the longest serving foreign minister in the Russian...

­Vladimir Putin became the prime newsmaker of both summits – G8 and NATO – in recent days. It was known in advance that he would not go to Chicago’s gathering of the alliance, but his unexpected refusal to appear at Camp David was a surprise. There is a bit of symbolism in both non-arrivals, but one should not overestimate it. Whatever the reason, Putin did not have much to discuss at...

­Vladimir Putin has once again demonstrated that he is a master of surprises. While everybody expected him to make his first public re-appearance as president at the G8 summit in Camp David, he announced that he can’t come due to domestic affairs. Russia, he said, will be represented by Prime Minister Medvedev. The explanation is questionable – he refers to the need to pay special attention to...

­Vladimir Putin is back. Monday, May 7th, he once again takes the oath of president of Russia. After his third term as president, Putin will be 65, and he will have been in power for almost 19 years. Since the beginning in August 1999, the core of Putin’s views has hardly changed. He can be classified as moderately conservative. The president-elect does not consider a return to the Soviet system...

­The Arab spring, distant as it may seem from Russia’s core interests, could have an increasing impact on Moscow’s political planning. Inherited from the USSR, Russia’s traditional approach was to side with the Arabs in the Middle East conflict. Recently I discovered an article by US scholar Mark Katz with the title What Would a Democratic Russian Foreign Policy Look Like. The author concludes...

­When Nicolas Sarkozy became French president in 2007, Moscow was upset. With Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin shared similar views about the proper European and world order. It was Chirac who basically won Putin’s support of the French and German position against the US-led war in Iraq. He “infected” the Russian president with rhetoric on a multipolar world. Sarkozy was, on...

­North Korea loves to remind everybody, how dangerous it is. Now Pyongyang plans to launch a rocket to mark the centenary of the birth of the great leader Kim Il-sung. Meanwhile, a new young leader to replace the recently departed Kim Jong Il, and a parliamentary election in neighboring South Korea. Of course nobody believes that the launch is part of a civilian space program, not a ballistic...

The US ambassador in Moscow is always a person on whom public attention is focused. Relations between the two countries are just too important. But the interest provoked by current ambassador Mike McFaul is even above the usual level. Since the former special advisor to President Obama arrived in January to start his new job, he has constantly been under discussion here. Recently the foreign...

­BRICS countries concluded their forth summit in New Delhi by urging a common approach to Syria which would definitely exclude any outside interference. They also agreed to make payments in local currencies (not dollars or euro) in transfers between the group members. But the two remarkable moves do not represent a total breakthrough in cooperation as the gradual approach of more tense economic...

For the first time since a diplomatic clash erupted late last year the whole UNSC, including the five permanent members, endorsed a statement on the situation in Syria and measures which should be taken for normalization in the country. Russia expressed its satisfaction that the document is balanced and moderate unlike previous proposals, which Moscow felt compelled to veto. Western reaction on...