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.
research paper

Illusions vs. Reality: Twenty-Five Years of US Policy Toward Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia

Eugene Rumer, Richard Sokolsky, Paul Stronski and Andrew S. Weiss February 09, 2017 Recommended Reads
Long-standing disagreements on national security interests and policies will make repairing the U.S.-Russian relationship challenging.
research paper

Wargaming NATO's Defense of the Baltics

David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson August 23, 2016 Recommended Reads
The games’ findings are unambiguous: At present NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members; fortunately, changing that will not require Herculean effort.
report

False Alarms, True Dangers?

Anthony Barrett June 09, 2016 Recommended Reads
Because the U.S. does not a have a consistent method of risk assessment for inadvertent nuclear war, misinterpretations could lead to a nuclear strike, either by U.S. or Russian forces.
column

What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like?

Stephen M. Walt January 18, 2016 Recommended Reads
Expanding NATO didn’t strengthen the alliance; it just committed the U.S. to protect a group of weak and hard-to-defend places that were far from home but right next door to Russia.
report

US-Russian Relations Beyond Ukraine

Richard Weitz May 01, 2015 Recommended Reads
Beyond Ukraine, the underlying source of conflict is the lack of stakeholders on either side who stand to benefit from improved relations.
research paper

Russia’s Breakout From the Post-Cold War System

Dmitri Trenin December 22, 2014 Recommended Reads
In 2014, Russia broke out of the post–Cold War order and openly challenged the U.S.-led international system.