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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Russia’s Nuclear-Capable Missiles: A Question of Escalation Control

William Alberque March 15, 2024 Recommended Reads
Aspects of Moscow’s military strategy in Ukraine, including its deployment of dual-use missile systems, have offered some potential insights into its nuclear-weapons doctrine.
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Sanctions Against Russia Ignore the Economic Challenges Facing Ukraine

Nicholas Mulder February 09, 2023 Recommended Reads
The West has shown that it possesses the tools to destroy the growth prospects of import-dependent middle-income economies. But sanctions have failed to cause crippling and insurmountable problems of the kind that will cause the collapse of either the Russian economy or Mr. Putin’s war effort.
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Can Lessons From Cuban Missile Crisis Help Stave Off US-Russia Confrontation?

Yana Demeshko and Natasha Yefimova-Trilling October 19, 2022 RM Exclusives
A look at 10 similarities and differences to get the conversation going
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Putin Is Not Bluffing With His Nuclear Threats

Graham Allison October 03, 2022 Recommended Reads
What do Biden and his national security team know that makes them take Putin’s nuclear threat so seriously?
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Russia-Belarus Nuclear Sharing Would Mirror NATO’s—and Worsen Europe’s Security

Nikolai N. Sokov July 01, 2022 Recommended Reads
Putin’s decision to deploy dual-capable missiles in Belarus raises three obvious questions: Why? Why now? Is the decision reversible?
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The Russia-Ukraine War: A Setback for Arms Control

Steven Pifer May 23, 2022 Recommended Reads
The Kremlin seems intent on achieving a victory on the battlefield, while relations between the West and Russia plummet to new lows. One casualty: U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations.
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Would Putin’s Russia Really Nuke Ukraine?

Graham Allison April 22, 2022 Recommended Reads
If a nuclear strike killed 10,000 or 20,000 innocent Ukrainians, how would the United States or NATO respond?
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The Cyber-Escalation Fallacy

Erica D. Lonergan April 15, 2022 Recommended Reads
For all its potential to disrupt companies, hospitals and utility grids during peacetime, cyberpower is much harder to use against targets of strategic significance or to achieve outcomes with decisive impacts on the battlefield or during crises short of war.
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Russia, the United States and the Counterrevolutionaries: A Trilateral Chess Match in the Middle East

Jon Hoffman July 21, 2021 RM Exclusives
Russia's return to the Middle East must be assessed from the perspective of regional actors, namely how they seek to use competition between Moscow and Washington for their own strategic benefit, our latest exclusive argues.
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Hacking Power Grids: New Tactic of War or Wave of the Future?

Nadiya Kostyuk November 03, 2017 RM Exclusives
Recent research suggests that cyberattacks have not yet become a force multiplier to conventional military tools in wartime, but this may very well change in coming years as countries invest in such capabilities.
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The Foreign Policy Price of Trump’s Russia Scandal

Robert E. Hunter May 23, 2017 Recommended Reads
In the current maelstrom of U.S. domestic politics, it will be virtually impossible for the United States to do what’s needed to promote its interests regarding Russia and related security issues.
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