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.
article

Russian Women in the Face of War Against Ukraine

Egle E. Murauskaite March 26, 2024 Partner Posts
Russia’s war against Ukraine has revealed stories about the heroic resistance efforts of Ukrainian women, but comparable stories have been entirely lacking on Russia’s side.
article

The War in Ukraine in a Transitional World Order

Robert Legvold February 23, 2024 RM Exclusives
The war in Ukraine is reshaping an international system released from its moorings and lurching in uncertain directions, which in turn is affecting the course and prospective outcome of the war.
article

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.
article

West Sanctions Russian Aviation, But Moscow Decides to Keep Planes Flying Despite Risks

Steven E. Harris October 26, 2023 RM Exclusives
As Russia seeks cracks in Western countries’ united efforts to sanction Russia over its war against Ukraine, U.S. policymakers and their allies need to better explain not only the motifs, but also the goals of their punitive measures against Russia’s aviation sector.
article

What Global Mutiny Trends Can Teach Us About Russia After Prigozhin’s Uprising

Maggie Dwyer August 11, 2023 RM Exclusives
Given what we know about mutinies around the globe, we should not assume Prigozhin’s rebellion will be a one-off, an expert argues.
article

Mutiny in Russia: What Happened, What’s Next and What To Be Thankful For

Simon Saradzhyan June 29, 2023 RM Exclusives
Deus ex machina or not, we should be thankful that this struggle for power within the Russian ruling elite did not acquire a nuclear dimension.
article

To Truly Pressure Russia’s Oligarchs, the West Should Target Their Wealth Managers

Ho-Chun Herbert Chang June 20, 2023 RM Exclusives
Russia's superrich rely on a small number of wealth managers, many of whom reside in Europe, making them relatively easy targets for Western policymakers hoping to ramp up sanctions amid Moscow's ongoing war with Ukraine.
article

To Blunt the Threat of Harm From AI, First Prevent Cold War II

Robert Wright June 08, 2023 Recommended Reads
 What's needed is a world more like that of a couple of decades ago, before America's relations with China (and Russia) started to go downhill, the author argues.
article

For Russians, Reading Is the New Resistance

Andrei Kolesnikov May 14, 2023 Recommended Reads
When Russia launched the war that Russians must not call a war—the “special military operation,” in the Kremlin’s parlance—many Russians immediately recognized the Orwellian reality in which they now lived. George Orwell's 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime in a state of perpetual war written in the 1940s, became the most popular fiction book.
article

Domestic Politics Encourage Continued War of Attrition in Ukraine in 2023

Thomas Graham February 22, 2023 RM Exclusives
The main question now: How far will the escalation go?
article

The Top 5 Lessons from Year 1 of Ukraine’s War

Stephen M. Walt February 09, 2023 Recommended Reads
Europe’s brutal conflict has been a harsh but instructive teacher.
article

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.
Refine & Filter

By Section

By Topic

By Country

By Regions

By Genre