by Gordon M. Hahn Russian President Vladimir Putin has submitted an as yet unpublished bill of amendments to the State Duma (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62617). The “explanatory note” published on the president’s site (http://kremlin.ru/supplement/5473), which describes the bill of amendments contained in the legislative bill, leaves more questions open than Putin’s original announcement of amendments in his address […]
by Gordon M. Hahn Introduction Russia’s soft authoritarian leader, President Vladimir Putin, has sent shock waves through Moscow and the Russian elite with the constitutional and government shakeup he proposed on Wednesday in a speech to the Federal Assembly, composed of the State Duma and Federation Council, the lower and upper chamber of Russia’s parliament. […]
by Gordon M. Hahn There is much speculation that one of the solutions Russian President Vladimir Putin is pursuing to get around the Russian constitution’s two-term presidential limit is one form of integration or another of Belarus into the Russian Federation to provide Putin a Belarusian golden parachute to a new post thereby preserving his […]
by Gordon M. Hahn The apparent overreaction by the U.S. to Iranian provocations represented by the assassination of Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Qassem Soleiman is one of the stronger blows to hit one of the most important nails in the coffin of U.S.-Russian relations: the revival of Russian-Western geopolitical competition outside Russia’s immediate central Eurasian […]
by Gordon M. Hahn UPDATE: On 19 December 2019 the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) held its last session of the year and first since the 10 December Paris communique agreed upon by the Normandy Four (N4) French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy. No progress […]
By Gordon M. Hahn The Paris 2019 meeting of the Normandy Four in its new format (Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy in place of Petro Poroshenko) achieved the minimum necessary to sustain hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict and as much as it could have given a series of related circumstances. Most important outcomes […]
by Gordon M. Hahn If Western leaders are able to put aside the now worn out cliches such as Russian Vladimir Putin ‘punching above his weight,’ ‘Trump handing Putin a victory on a silver plate’, not to mention ‘Trump as Putin agent’, there are serious lessons that they might still be able to draw from […]
by Gordon M. Hahn With it becoming ever more clear that the US government and media have been covering up especially the Democratic Party’s collusion with Ukraine’s government in order to facilitate the self-enrichment of DP leaders’ family members, undermine the presidential candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump (however unpresidential he may be) and foment […]
by Gordon M. Hahn In researching a new book on the Russian dilemma of having historically as its ‘significant Other’ the very West that also has been Russia’s main national security threat, I re-read Russian-American historian Nicholas V. Riasanovsky’s classic study The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought.[1] Published on the […]
by Gordon M. Hahn In researching a new book on the Russian dilemma of having historically as its ‘significant Other’ the very West that also has been Russia’s main national security threat, I re-read Russian-American historian Nicholas V. Riasanovsky’s classic study The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought.[1] Published on the […]