Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, was in some ways an anticlimactic event. It was widely expected, as were the immediate reactions: recognition by the United States and a majority of European Union states, and lack of recognition...
Policy Memos by Nikolai Sokov
In August-September 2002, Russia appeared to have a short romance with the U.S. policy of preemption, which was annoucned months before and made official in the National Security Strategy issued by the White House in September 2002. A Russian pro-government Internet...
Ratification of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, or the Moscow Treaty), signed by Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush on May 24, 2002, is all but certain. Critics in both capitals have apparently been proven wrong—it turned out to be possible to break...
The November 2001 summit between Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin marked the end of the lengthy saga of the ABM Treaty. After years of intense conflict, the situation is curiously peaceful: Russia has clearly indicated that it would not initiate a major...
With Vladimir Putin’s presidential inauguration in May 2000, Russian policy toward the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union began to change. By the end of 2001 these changes have become significant enough to require that the United States and NATO...
The idea that unilateral reduction of nuclear arms is preferable to the traditional but slower process of negotiated formal arms control treaties that dominated US Soviet/Russian relations for three decades is becoming increasingly popular. Closer scrutiny suggests...
The new Treaty on Good-Neighborly Relations, Friendship, and Cooperation signed by Russia and China on July 16, 2001, was immediately discounted by the Bush administration as merely a reaffirmation of the long-standing positions of the two countries. Indeed, the two...
In the summer of 2000, a long-simmering conflict within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) burst into the open in a series of leaks to the media that culminated in a stormy meeting of the Collegium of the Ministry of Defense (an assembly of the top brass) on July...