After spending the past 13 months in Moscow (and 14 years before that), I have come home with a few firm convictions: (a) Americans and Russians woefully misunderstand each other; (b) Moscow does not, and will not, accept complicity in or responsibility for any of the breakdowns in the bilateral relationship, at least since the fall of the U.S.S.R.; (c) Russia’s senior leadership has internalized the assertion that the country is hemmed in by hostile forces determined to keep it from assuming its rightful place as a world power. None of this bodes well for U.S.-Russia ties.

From Henry Kissinger to Sam Nunn, from Russia’s military modernization in the West to economic disparities between Russia and China in the Far East—check out Russia Matters' 10 most read pieces for 2017.

In their efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff U.S. policymakers should leverage Moscow’s long history of relatively close ties with Pyongyang and give more consideration to the role Russia could play as a mediator: This was the consensus among an international panel of scholars, including two Russians and three Americans, at a talk hosted last month by the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The event coincided with FPRI’s publication of a report , “Nuclear Weapons and Russian-North Korean Relations,” featuring the scholars’ work and claiming to be the most in-depth recent examination of the Kremlin’s relationship with its reclusive Far East neighbor.

The conference proved timely, coming just one day after North Korea launched its new Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, which some analysts say could threaten the U.S. mainland. All the panelists emphasized the importance of negotiations with the North Korean regime, as the alternative could very well be nuclear war, which would be devastating for all involved. While Pyongyang and Washington may not want an active conflict on the Korean peninsula, the countries face a “binary choice” between war and negotiations, according to Georgy Toloraya, a professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

While Russia has its own interests surrounding North Korea, including stability, denuclearization and limited Western influence on the peninsula—the first two coincide with U.S. interests, while the last does not. Still, Moscow has enough common interests with all the relevant parties to authoritatively communicate with them, according to the panelists.

Last year, Russia’s former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin—who for the past 18 months has been preparing, with many colleagues, the most comprehensive and liberal program of structural economic reforms Russia has seen in a long time—spoke at the annual Valdai Club gathering with modest optimism for the country’s future. This year Kudrin did not take part in the Valdai meeting, and when I saw him earlier in October he seemed a beaten and depressed man who sensed that his hard work would lead to little or nothing.

That turnabout gives a good sense not just of the domestic economic policies we can expect from President Vladimir Putin, who did not exactly shock the world this month when he announced his candidacy for another six-year term, but also a hint of the legacy we might expect him to leave behind when his time as Russia’s de jure and de facto leader—now at 17 years and counting—comes to an end. Operating on the assumption of a Putin victory in 2018, I suspect that (a) his early economic successes—like robust growth of 7 percent annually in 2000-2008—will be eclipsed by much weaker economic performance to come and (b) we will not see significant change for the better in Russia’s relations with the West.

Both these features resemble Russia under a different long-serving leader, Leonid Brezhnev, whose tenure from 1964 until his death in 1982 was marked by political stability and, toward the end, by a stagnant economy, with the Soviet Union falling behind global competitors, and by tensions with the West, especially with the United States. Both in today’s Russia and in Brezhnev’s, the troubled relations with Washington dropped to new lows after brief thaws (which have been the exception, not the rule, over the past hundred years): détente in the early and mid-1970s and the Obama-Medvedev “reset” of 2009-2011. And as Putin has focused on reinvigorating Russia’s military might and global stature—at the expense, some would argue, of improvements at home—so did Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, reaching full nuclear and military parity with its superpower rival while its citizens famously queued for food and toilet paper.

That said, the USSR under Brezhnev—even in his much-joked-about dotage—was a far more authoritarian police state than today (and likely just about as corrupt); in foreign policy, it was much more seriously contesting the interests of the United States and its allies all over the world. And yet in the 1980s few, if any, of us, inside or outside Russia, had any idea that within a decade the mighty Soviet Union would collapse.

One big question about Putin’s legacy has to do with just that: Are there real seeds of revolution in the country and what will make them sprout and grow? The Western press has made much of the youth demonstrations organized and inspired by opposition figure Alexei Navalny, but this is more of a mirage than the embryo of a major social movement. Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center and perhaps Russia’s most respected pollster, told us in Moscow that it is exactly the young generation (age 18-29) that is the most pro-Putin of all, with nearly 90 percent supporting the president. How badly disappointed will they be in the regime in the years to come and what will they do about it?

President Vladimir Putin showered criticism on the “so-called West,” particularly on Washington, in a speech and question-answer session in Sochi on Oct. 19, leaving foreign-relations analysts in the audience with a rather grim view of the foreseeable future of U.S.-Russia ties. The Russian leader did make a point, however, of blaming the troubled relationship on Congress and President Donald Trump’s predecessors rather than the current administration.

Putin spoke calmly for most of his three or so hours at the Valdai Discussion Club—an annual international gathering of Russia experts, policymakers and journalists—but grew visibly emotional when discussing the Ukraine crisis, showing no readiness for any concessions and blaming the West and pro-Western political forces in Ukraine for both the conflict and the stalemate in implementing the long-stalled Minsk-2 peace accords. In contrast, he was cool and collected when claiming he was not worried about the deployment and training of NATO forces on Russia’s western flank.

In an unusual twist, Putin also repeatedly emphasized his discontent with U.S.-Russian interactions in the area of nuclear security, blaming the U.S. for what he saw as a failure to reciprocate for Russia’s unilateral granting of access to its nuclear weapons facilities in the 1990s. Not only did he reiterate earlier grievances that Washington had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness at the time, but he invoked the perceived one-sidedness of that early cooperation when answering seemingly unrelated questions. One of those concerned Russia’s response if the U.S. declares the American bureaus of state-funded Russian media RT and Sputnik to be “foreign agents” (Putin said the response would be “symmetrical”). This indicates that Americans’ purported betrayal of Russia’s good will on nuclear security is now another official talking point on Russia's list of grievances vis-à-vis the U.S.

The Russian president didn’t face any direct questions on his plans to run for re-election in March and dodged indirect ones, but he did not sound like a man preparing to step down.

His comments concerning the most salient aspects of U.S.-Russian relations are below, paraphrased except for remarks in quotation marks, which are direct speech. The original Russian can be found via this link . The compilation was prepared by RM Staff in Sochi and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Update: The Kremlin's English translation is now available .

On the eve of his departure as U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Tefft (pictured above, right) sat down for a lengthy interview with the Russian daily Kommersant. Needless to say, the changing of the guard at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow—Tefft’s successor, Jon Huntsman, presented his credentials to President Vladimir Putin on Oct. 3—comes at a low-point in U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations.

Among the topics broached in Tefft’s interview were Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and the retaliatory expulsions of diplomats that has left the Moscow embassy short-staffed—severely so, in Tefft’s view. Still, the outgoing ambassador suggested that he saw promise for U.S.-Russian cooperation on several fronts, including Syria and North Korea, and he was receptive to a Russian plan to deploy U.N. peacekeepers in Ukraine—with some big caveats. At the same time, Tefft bluntly insisted that Russia needed to acknowledge meddling in the election and to restore Ukraine’s “territorial integrity.”
One topic that was notably absent from Tefft’s interview was arms control, even as differences between Moscow and Washington threaten to kill the INF Treaty and hobble the Treaty on Open Skies. What follows are highlights of the interview, back-translated from Kommersant. (We presume the interview was in English, but no transcript was publicly available at the time of publication.)

The U.S. State Department released new figures on compliance with the New START Treaty on Oct. 1. The numbers of U.S. and Russian warheads and delivery systems have continued to decline, undermining earlier speculation that Russia may fail to meet the treaty’s central requirements by the Feb. 5, 2018, deadline. We remain confident that Russia will meet the requirements on time. To do so, it must simply retire some more Soviet-era MIRV’ed ICBMs. As noted by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, Russia “is now only 11 warheads above the New START treaty limit of 1,550 warheads … [and] is already below the treaty limit on deployed launchers as well as deployed and non-deployed launchers.” The latest data on systems covered by the treaty can be found in our Facts section, while Dr. Kristensen’s detailed explainer on Russia’s nuclear modernization can be found at this link.

Two years ago this month, Russia launched its military intervention in Syria. This step was almost instantly criticized by the Obama administration, with the U.S. president warning that Vladimir Putin is dragging his country into a quagmire. The Russian military operations in Syria have proved at times to be brutal and indiscriminate, causing many civilian deaths—nearly 4,000 in the first year of its campaign alone, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which continues to blame Russia for scores of civilian deaths with grim regularity. But has Russia gotten stuck in a quagmire or has it achieved any of its goals? Take a look at this presentation that Russia Matters director Simon Saradzhyan gave on Moscow’s objectives and interests in Syria shortly after Russian warplanes launched their first strikes and decide for yourself.

As the Russian and Chinese navies hold joint war games for the second time this year, experts can’t help but wonder whether the growing size and geographic range of such exercises mean that Moscow and Beijing are moving closer to a military pact. “They are building a de facto alliance,” leading Russian military expert Vasily Kashin told the Wall Street Journal in reference to the second stage of Joint Sea-2017, which is set to begin this week. “They want to understand on a granular level how their two militaries can cooperate.”