Russian President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honour at China’s celebration of ten years of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) held on October 17-18 in Beijing, where everyone who was anyone in the development world attended the party.

As Xi and his Russian counterpart meet, both are facing calls to do more to ease tension in the Middle East, amid fresh scrutiny of a relationship that looks increasingly one-sided.

There was a whiff of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ at the 20th Valdai annual meeting this week at a hotel over the gorgeous heights of the Krasnaya Polyana. north-west of the picturesque resort Sochi.

Demonizing Putin is not a policy. It’s an excuse for the absence of one.

Don’t be distracted by stories on Russia trafficking troops from Cuba or tapping up Kim Jong-un for missiles, writes Mary Dejevksy. Putin is playing a very different game with his latest salvo in the bloody war

The Kremlin is now using every tool it can find to foment divisions within the Nato military alliance

Long focused on security, the Russian president is rewarding loyalty among the ruling elite and showering his most important constituency — the men with guns — with cash.

”The worse, the better.” During the short-lived coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries over the weekend, it seemed that much of the US commentariat had adopted this old Leninist creed, aimed originally at undermining Tsarist rule and hastening the triumph of Bolshevism. The more trouble Putin faced at home, many American media influencers reasoned, the better off America and the world would be.

How withholding respect for Russia could lead to war.

British journalist Philip Short has written a long, in-depth biography of Vladimir Putin. The timing of its publication was rather fortuitous, having been released just a few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The book is one of the better ones about Putin, though it certainly has its flaws. Before going into the good, the bad, and the befuddling, I will make a few general observations.