Russia News

I traveled halfway around the world earlier this month for a journalism conference in an unlikely place: Moscow. It was an invitation-only event, attended by about 300 international journalists, focusing on censorship and what was termed to be a “farewell to mainstream” by Russia’s state-run Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) International Information Agency. We debated dicey…

What seemed like an encouraging headline a few weeks ago was really all smoke and mirrors—far from pulling out of Syria, Russia has been rolling in even more troops and equipment. Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again proven that he cannot be trusted. On March 14, Putin began ordering troops to return home from…

The Russian government’s reliance on propaganda to advance its aggressive agenda and control its own population should give the West pause before partnering with Vladimir Putin. In an April 14 three-hour marathon call-in show on Russian television, for instance, Putin attacked American “imperial ambitions”—hardly an accusation that fits the Obama administration’s approach to the world. It…

People seem a bit surprised—even perplexed—by the breathless news reports and video of Russian warplanes “buzzing” an American warship operating in international waters in the Baltic Sea this week. The reality is that they shouldn’t be. That, of course, isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be deeply troubled for the safety of our sailors on…

Every year at this time, we see the same kind of headlines: “U.S. biggest military spender in the world.” They’re all based on the release of the global military spending database, an annual report compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). What the headlines usually miss is that U.S. defense spending is going…

Russia continues to violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by fielding a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile system. Rose Gottemoeller and Brian McKeon, two high-level administration officials dealing with arms control issues, testified earlier this month before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees on how the Obama administration is…

On Tuesday morning a Russian Su-24 warplane was shot down by Turkish F-16s after violating Turkish airspace. According to the latest media reports one Russian pilot was killed and another has been captured by local rebel forces on the ground. To discuss what this means for NATO, the U.S., and the on-going conflict in Syria…

Last week, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter gave a major speech at the 2015 Reagan National Defense Forum outlining the Obama administration’s new strategies to respond to Russia and China. While it is certainly clear that the United States is in need of new strategies to respond to these two countries—who seem to be outmaneuvering…

I never thought I’d say this, considering recent events, but we may have to—gulp—thank Russia for something: a potential positive (and long overdue) shift in our Iraq/Syria/Islamic State/al-Qaeda policy, which has been both flailing and failing. While the White House would deny it, it’s very likely that the Kremlin’s intervention into the Syrian civil war…

The leaders of Russia and Iran both have ramped up their propaganda machines to project images of surging regional influence within Syria. This aggressive news management by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, not so incidentally, coincides with the waning of U.S. power and influence. Since the start of the Russian…

Russia is not the only country that feels free to intervene in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime and attack U.S.-supported Syrian rebels. Cuba and Iran, two countries eagerly courted by the Obama administration that have recently signed controversial diplomatic agreements with the United States, also are deploying troops to join the fight there….

The Kremlin is not our friend. Nor is Moscow a 10-foot-tall threat to our national interests. What America needs is a middling foreign policy that looks to marginalize Russia’s capacity to mess with us. And there is no better place to start this approach than in Syria. Putin has made a muscular move to support…

On Sept. 2, Russia tested a ground-launched cruise missile named SSC-X-8, in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, according to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon. This test represents the latest in a long train of Russian violations of the 1987 treaty, which prohibits ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500…

As if Syria wasn’t nasty enough after four years of bloody civil war—a brutal Syrian regime, Islamic State barbarity, an Iranian and Hezbollah influx, and the presence of al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its bomb-building Khorasan group. Now reports of rampaging Russians. Reports indicate that Moscow has deployed a military expeditionary force of soldiers and equipment…

The multi-front cyberspace information war in which we recently have found ourselves just got a little more complicated. A group which calls itself Cyber Caliphate, assumed to have ties to the terrorist group ISIS, may in fact be a creation of Russian hackers taking advantage of the havoc wrecked on social media and the Internet…