PONARS Eurasia 48 - PONARS Eurasia

The Next Step in Democracy Assistance to Russia: Targeting Military Reform

If American policymakers want to help ensure a democratic future for Eastern Europe, then they should focus on ensuring a democratic future for Russia. If American policymakers see the condition…

Russia’s Strategic View: Diminished Threats and Diminished Capabilities

A recent Congressional Research Service report states that Russia is a "nuclear superpower" intent on "maintaining rough parity with the United States." In fact, Russians no longer view their state…

Yeltsin’s Latest Military Reform Initiative: Operational-Strategic Commands

This fall the Yeltsin administration announced a new military reform initiative: the transformation of existing military districts into operational strategic commands. While the proposed system has been adopted in order…

Promoting a Strong Civil Society: US Foreign Assistance and Russian NGOs

In February 1997, President Clinton launched the Partnership for Freedom, a new program of bilateral assistance for democracy promotion in Russia and the other NIS countries. This program asks for…

Russia’s Relations with NATO: Lessons from the History of the Entente Cordiale

As NATO contemplates the second wave of enlargement, many wonder what the Russian response might be. The experience of 1996-98 might suggest an optimistic scenario: the first wave was met…

The Rise and Fall of the Russian Internal Troops?

The conventional wisdom among both Russian and Western analysts is that the Internal Troops (VV) of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) have been a bureaucratic Pac-Man since the…

Empowerment, Ricochets and End-Runs: Russia’s Integration with Western Human Rights Institutions and Practices

Russia's integration with Western institutions is proceeding along several different fronts. US media and policy analysts have emphasized two aspects of this process: the economic (increasingly dense ties between Russian…

The Russian National Security Concept: A Liberal-Statist Synthesis

In the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet ideas and interests had been thoroughly discredited, and Russia's domestic political, economic, and social system had…

Why and How the US Should Aid Russia

Since the Russian financial collapse in August 1998, critics of US policy toward Russia from both the right and the left have had a heyday asserting that the Clinton Administration…

Russia’s Fiscal Veto on CIS Integration

When the words "Russia" and "Near Abroad" emerge in the same sentence, they usually conjure up visions of imperialism and political subversion. In this brief, I argue that Russia has…

Clinton’s Moscow Mission

When presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin meet in Moscow next month, issues such as START II, NATO expansion, trade with Iran and Iraq, and Russia's new draconian law on…

Strategies for US Democracy Assistance to Russia After Market Failure

While the collapse of Russia's market last summer did not destroy new, partially-formed, post-Soviet political and social institutions, their condition this winter is far from stable. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs)…

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