Analysis

This listing contains all the analytical materials posted on the Russia Matters website. These include: RM Exclusives, commissioned by Russia Matters exclusively for this website; Recommended Reads, deemed particularly noteworthy by our editorial team; Partner Posts, originally published by our partners elsewhere; and Future Policy Leaders, pieces by promising young scholars and policy thinkers. Content can be filtered by genre and subject-specific criteria and is updated often. Gradually we will be adding older Recommended Reads and Partner Posts dating back as far as 2011.
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Blood and Iron: How Nationalist Imperialism Became Russia’s State Ideology

Andrei Kolesnikov December 06, 2023 Partner Posts
The nationalist-imperialist worldview that the Putin regime is imposing on Russians is intended to feed on the past and exploit historical memories and concepts to reshape and manage the mass consciousness of the Russian people.
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PONARS Eurasia: Russian Military Keynesianism: Who Benefits from the War in Ukraine?

Volodymyr Ishchenko, Ilya Matveev and Oleg Zhuravlev December 05, 2023 Recommended Reads
How has the transformation of the Russian economy and society in response to the challenges posed by the invasion of Ukraine affected popular support for the war?
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Unfulfillable Promise: Mediation Efforts in the Russian-Ukrainian War Since 2014

Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff December 05, 2023 Partner Posts
This memo is the first in a two-part assessment of the effectiveness of mediation in the RussianUkrainian war during its gray-zone (2014-2022) and conventional (2022-present) stages.
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Putin’s Favorite “Project Managers” Could Become a Risk to the Regime

Andrey Pertsev December 05, 2023 Recommended Reads
Enterprising and competent officials know full well they can survive without Putin. Whether the regime can survive without them, though, is another matter.
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What Would a Trump Administration Mean for the War in Ukraine?

Anatol Lieven November 30, 2023 RM Exclusives
Following the failure of the Ukrainian offensive, all major players in the war in Ukraine seem to be awaiting the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election to address the problem of negotiations.
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Alternate Reality: How Russian Society Learned to Stop Worrying About the War

Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov November 28, 2023 Partner Posts
Many Russians equate their country with the political regime that rules it, and believe it is their duty to support the state’s actions. This belief and the limited impact the war in Ukraine has had on the day-to-day lives of most Russians go some way to explaining continuing high levels of support for the war among Russians.
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Gender Norms Keep Russian, Ukrainian Servicewomen From Combat

Jessica Trisko Darden November 22, 2023 RM Exclusives
Despite a century of women’s involvement in the region’s wars, Russian and Ukrainian women's involvement as combatants today echoes a global pattern where women are relegated to roles that distance them from frontline combat. 
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Nuclear weapons, AI and the June 1980 US False Alarms

Pavel Podvig November 19, 2023 Partner Posts
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potentially dangerous link to nuclear weapons is a quite popular topic these days. Some of it is because nobody really knows what the role of AI can be. It is a (relatively) new and quite exciting technology and it seems to offer some benefits in assessing complex situations.
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Joe Biden: The U.S. Won’t Back Down from the Challenge of Putin and Hamas

Joe Biden November 18, 2023 Partner Posts
Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
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Redefining Success in Ukraine

Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan November 17, 2023 Partner Posts
A New Strategy Must Balance Means and Ends.
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It’s Time to End Magical Thinking About Russia’s Defeat

Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss November 16, 2023 Partner Posts
Putin has withstood the West’s best efforts to reverse his invasion of Ukraine, and his hold on power is firm. The U.S. and its allies need a new strategy: containment.
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Living in an à la Carte World: What European Policymakers Should Learn from Global Public Opinion

Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard November 15, 2023 Partner Posts
Leaders in Europe and the United States often frame the 21st century world as a rivalry between competing ideological and political systems. They talk of winning over the ‘global south’ to the West and shoring up the rules-based order against its challengers.
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