Russia, politics and power: internal & external(new title)

[Stan]

Hey Eric !

Yeah, if you want to face nuclear annihilation, that's your choice....and if Ukraine wants to bind itself to a foreign power and limit its sovereignty, then let it do that...

The President took the whole Carrot

From the Urban Dictionary: an expression meaning a situation in which one factor alone can change or cancel out everything

Well now, looks like Ukrainians will no longer have to concern themselves with being annihilated as the former Russian red-headed stepchild (damn, we need a rocket scientist herein to explain ballistic missile trajectory that close to the launch pads).

MOSCOW. Feb 13 (Interfax) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said in an attempt to allay Russia's concerns that the Ukrainian Constitution rules out the stationing of foreign military bases on the country's territory.

"If the issue is that our neighbor worries about the deployment of a NATO military base, then apparently this issue will never be on the agenda. As you know, the Ukrainian Constitution stipulates that the Ukrainian territory cannot be used for the deployment of foreign military bases," Yushchenko said at a meeting with the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia on Wednesday in Moscow.

"If there are topics sensitive to Russia, we are ready to discuss them. We do not want to damage [Russia's national interests] by our moves," the Ukrainian president said.

[Ron Humphrey]

Hey Eric !


The President took the whole Carrot
Well now, looks like Ukrainians will no longer have to concern themselves with being annihilated as the former Russian red-headed stepchild (damn, we need a rocket scientist herein to explain ballistic missile trajectory that close to the launch pads).

Ukrainian territory cannot be used for the deployment of foreign military bases

Does that mean absolutely no Russian bases either??

[Beelzebubalicious]

Does that mean absolutely no Russian bases either??

There's nothing absolute out here. What's the definition of a military base or deployment or foreign? What about the autonomous republic of Crimea? Is that technically Ukrainian territory? What about th e Constitution? Does is even matter?

I agree with Rob that it's about raising hell and I think Putin and company enjoy it.

As for the carrot, Stan, Yuschenko has taken a whole lot more than that. ...

[Beelzebubalicious]

This is a pretty good little article on Russia's use of soft power. Besides this, there's the recent signing up of Serbia and Hungary to the South Stream gas pipeline. Russia is winning this economic battle vs. the U.S. and EU...

RUSSIAN SOFT-POWER INCREASING IN AZERBAIJAN

By Fariz Ismailzade

Friday, February 29, 2008


Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, political analysts predicted that the Kremlin would step up its efforts to conquer the hearts and minds of people living in the post-Soviet region. This “soft diplomacy” has long been a powerful tool for Western democracies, and it is no longer a secret that Russian political experts have advised official Moscow to use similar tactics to overcome the Soviet successor states’ obsession with Euro-Atlantic integration.

http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article...cle_id=2372845

[Jedburgh]

International Affairs, Mar 08: 'New Cold War' or 'Twenty Years' Crisis'? Russia and International Politics

The debate over the dynamics of Russian foreign policy has become ever more closely tied to controversy over the ‘regime question’: the problem of the nature of the political system that took shape during Vladimir Putin’s two terms as president between 2000 and 2008. Indeed, it appeared that one could not be understood without the other being taken into account. While foreign policy can never be dealt with in isolation from domestic constraints, the collapse of the one category into the other in the discourse of the late Putin years is reminiscent of the essentialism that characterized debate in the Soviet era. This is just one example of the way in which, in a structural sense, Cold War patterns of thinking have once again surfaced in discussion about Russia and its role in the world. Putin’s second term as president from 2004 was accompanied by ever more insistent suggestions that a new Cold War was in the making. This article will try to place these concerns in context and to provide both an empirical and a theoretical analysis of why the notion of ‘Cold War’ has returned to haunt us once again. It will deal with issues both substantive—namely, whether we are indeed entering a period that can be described as a Cold War—and discursive—why the category of Cold War remains so stubbornly entrenched in our understanding of international politics in general, and in relations with Russia in particular. I will begin by looking at the framework of Russian policy between 2000 and 2006, a period characterized by what we call a ‘new realism’. From here I will move on to the unravelling of the new realism from 2006, and will then consider the features and causes of the putative ‘new Cold War’......

Complete 27 page paper at the link.