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.
report

NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard

Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton December 12, 2017 Recommended Reads
Newly declassified documents lend credence to claims that Western leaders repeatedly reassured their Soviet counterparts in the early 1990s that NATO would not budge "one inch eastward."
article

Nuclear Dangers from North Korea: Managing the Risks to the US and Russia

Joshua H. Pollack October 27, 2017 RM Exclusives
The risk of an American conflict with North Korea is growing, and along with it so is the risk of an accidental war between the two nuclear superpowers.
podcast

Cooperative Threat Reduction or: How I Stopped Worrying and Got Rid of the Bomb

Nukes of Hazard September 15, 2017 Recommended Reads
Former U.S. Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, along with former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Andrew Weber, discuss the challenge of securing and eliminating the disintegrating Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal at the end of the Cold War in this Nukes of Hazard podcast. 
report

A Roadmap for US-Russia Relations

Edited by Andrey Kortunov and Olga Oliker August 01, 2017 Partner Posts
This report by the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program and the Russian International Affairs Council looks at the troubled state of the U.S.-Russia relationship and recommends areas of potential cooperation.
article

The US Sanctions Bill Is a Win for Russia

Angela Stent July 28, 2017 Recommended Reads
The EU may rethink its own sanctions regime if the U.S. sanctions bill moves forward. This, of course, would be good news for the Kremlin.
policy brief

Trump, Putin and the Growing Risk of Military Escalation

Łukasz Kulesa and Shatabhisha Shetty July 04, 2017 Partner Posts
In this policy brief, the authors argue that the presidency of Donald Trump is complicating an already tense and challenged deterrence relationship between Russia and NATO, and this is exacerbated by the tendency of the Russian leadership to take foreign policy risks.
report

Strengthening Strategic Stability with Russia

Christopher S. Chivvis, Andrew Radin, Dara Massicot and Clinton Bruce Reach July 01, 2017 Recommended Reads
With the U.S. and Russia still possessing nuclear arsenals that could devastate whole continents, what can be done to shore up strategic stability amid rising tensions between the two countries? A new report looks for answers.
explainer

25 Years of Nuclear Security Cooperation by the US, Russia and Other Newly Independent States: A Timeline

Mariana Budjeryn, Simon Saradzhyan and William Tobey June 16, 2017 RM Exclusives
At a time when the U.S. and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union still saw each other as mortal enemies, they found the courage, creativity and capacity for trust to work together in the name of preventing nuclear catastrophe.
article

Is NATO Getting Too Big to Succeed?

Charles Kupchan May 25, 2017 Recommended Reads
The alliance's practice of anchoring new democracies to the Atlantic community by absorbing them into NATO has backfired.
article

Donald Trump’s Plan to Play Russia Against China Is a Fool’s Errand

Alexander Gabuev May 24, 2017 Recommended Reads
While the Trump administration may be trying out triangular diplomacy, a grand bargain with the U.S. on China is unlikely to sway Putin.
article

New Allies for a New World

Stephen Kinzer May 14, 2017 Recommended Reads
In a world of three great powers, a future U.S.-Russia partnership against China is possible.
article

A Sino-Russian Military-Political Alliance Would Be Bad News for America

Simon Saradzhyan May 12, 2017 RM Exclusives
Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing signals growing Russian support for China’s OBOR initiative and even the far-off prospect of a Sino-Russian alliance. America would be wise to gently pull Moscow from Beijing’s embrace.
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