Vladimir Putin’s attempts to blame the invasion of Ukraine on NATO are dishonest, according to Norway’s army chief, who argues that the Russian dictator’s own actions prove he does not view the alliance as a genuine security threat. Speaking after a September 16 meeting of NATO commanders in Oslo, the Norwegian Chief of Defense, General
With attention at NATO’s July summit in Vilnius firmly focused on Ukraine’s membership prospects, the absence of Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili received relatively little attention. And yet this absence reflected an ongoing geopolitical shift in the wider Black Sea region with potentially major consequences for international security. While Russia is losing in Ukraine, there
DOWNLOAD The Rethinking Stability initiative was a partnership between Interpeace, the Atlantic Council, and the Bundesakademie für Sicherheitspolitik (BAKS). The initiative was made possible thanks to the generous contributions of the German Federal Foreign Office. In the last twenty years, stabilization has become perhaps the main approach through which international actors have engaged in conflict
To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British
Sweden is poised to become the thirty-second member of the NATO Alliance and Russia does not appear to be at all concerned by the prospect. The breakthrough moment for the Swedes came ahead of last week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to end months of opposition and back the
The Wagner mutiny in late June was a brief affair, but it is casting a long shadow over Putin’s Russia. In less than forty-eight hours, Wagner chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his troops succeeded in shattering the carefully constructed myth of Putin the strongman, while exposing the weakness at the heart of his regime. Although the
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has recently initiated a national debate over the creation of a Ukrainian Doctrine that will shape the future development of the country. I am confident that defense policy will be at the heart of this national dialogue and see a number of key points that are worth underlining. The first point
The recent revolt by Russia’s Wagner Group was a short-lived affair but the repercussions continue to be felt throughout the Russian Federation and beyond. Perhaps the biggest single lesson from the aborted coup is the fragility of the Putin regime. For many years, the Kremlin has sought to present Vladimir Putin as a powerful and
The attempted putsch by Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his Wagner troops in late June is perhaps best understood as a symptom of Russia’s ongoing imperial decline. Much like the invasion of Ukraine itself, it is part of a broader historical process that can be traced back to 1989 and the fall of the Soviet incarnation of
The recent Wagner mutiny in Russia was a short-lived affair but it has succeeded in exposing the myth of Vladimir Putin as a formidable political strongman who will go to extremes to achieve his goals. In reality, Putin’s failure to punish mutinous troops who seized a major Russian city and marched on Moscow has revealed
