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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What the Pentagon Has Learned From 2 Years of War in Ukraine

Alex Horton February 22, 2024 Recommended Reads
A classified year-long study on the lessons learned from both sides of the bloody campaign examined five areas: ground maneuver, air power, information warfare, sustaining and growing forces and long range fire capability.
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Russia's Upper Hand Puts US-Ukraine at a Crossroads

George Beebe and Anatol Lieven January 11, 2024 Recommended Reads
Absent a compromise settlement, massive levels of aid for Kyiv would have to continue, perhaps indefinitely.
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PONARS Eurasia: Russian Military Keynesianism: Who Benefits from the War in Ukraine?

Volodymyr Ishchenko, Ilya Matveev and Oleg Zhuravlev December 05, 2023 Recommended Reads
How has the transformation of the Russian economy and society in response to the challenges posed by the invasion of Ukraine affected popular support for the war?
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How to End the War in Ukraine

Rajan Menon April 26, 2023 Recommended Reads
On Stopping the Fighting and Building the Peace
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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.
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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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What Did Biden Achieve in Geneva?

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. July 08, 2021 Recommended Reads
Even if formal cybersecurity treaties are unworkable, it may still be possible to set limits on certain types of civilian targets, and to negotiate rough rules of the road.
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SolarWinds Hack: Why We Need Defense, Not Retaliation

William Akoto January 31, 2021 Recommended Reads
There may be no way to prevent systems from being breached, but the right cyber defenses could limit the damage and speed the recovery when they are broken into.
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The U.S. Failed to Execute Its Cyberstrategy—and Russia Pounced

Rob Knake January 06, 2021 Recommended Reads
To address U.S. cyber vulnerabilities now requires not a new grand cyberstrategy but the discipline and resources to implement the current one.
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With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the Victim

Paul Kolbe December 23, 2020 Recommended Reads
Instead of acting surprised after a cyberattack, the United States must better defend its digital homeland and learn how to better operate in a state of constant cyberconflict.
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3 lessons from Russia's cyberhack into U.S. agencies

Erica Borghard and Jacquelyn Schneider December 16, 2020 Recommended Reads
The cyber-intrusion that breached the IT systems of several U.S. government organizations contains a number of important lessons for analysts and policymakers.