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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The Best Laid Plans: Putin’s Rogue Election Announcement

Andrey Pertsev December 13, 2023 Partner Posts
The president’s inclination to ignore his administration and act upon his own initiative is damaging to both himself and the power vertical he created.
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Attitudes toward Russia’s War on Ukraine in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Hannah Chapman and Raushan Zhandayeva December 12, 2023 Partner Posts
How does the public in Central Asia view Russia’s war against Ukraine? This memo provides a preliminary examination of public attitudes toward the invasion in two Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
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The War That Neither Ukraine nor the West Can Afford to Lose

Serhii Plokhy December 12, 2023 Partner Posts
The war between Russia and Ukraine can continue indefinitely unless the West realizes that what’s at stake isn’t just the fate of Ukraine but the future of the West itself
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Bureaucracy as the Pillar of Stability: Are There Any Real Institutions Inside the Russian Political Regime?

Ekaterina Schulmann December 08, 2023 Partner Posts
Russia’s ruling mechanism—bureaucratic institutions—may outlast the current personalism. This vast network of civil servants, technocrats and administrators forms a modestly resilient framework that endures beyond individual political decisions, providing continuity and ensuring the steady day-to-day functioning of the government.
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Blood and Iron: How Nationalist Imperialism Became Russia’s State Ideology

Andrei Kolesnikov December 06, 2023 Partner Posts
The nationalist-imperialist worldview that the Putin regime is imposing on Russians is intended to feed on the past and exploit historical memories and concepts to reshape and manage the mass consciousness of the Russian people.
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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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Unfulfillable Promise: Mediation Efforts in the Russian-Ukrainian War Since 2014

Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff December 05, 2023 Partner Posts
This memo is the first in a two-part assessment of the effectiveness of mediation in the RussianUkrainian war during its gray-zone (2014-2022) and conventional (2022-present) stages.
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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.
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Alternate Reality: How Russian Society Learned to Stop Worrying About the War

Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov November 28, 2023 Partner Posts
Many Russians equate their country with the political regime that rules it, and believe it is their duty to support the state’s actions. This belief and the limited impact the war in Ukraine has had on the day-to-day lives of most Russians go some way to explaining continuing high levels of support for the war among Russians.
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Nuclear weapons, AI and the June 1980 US False Alarms

Pavel Podvig November 19, 2023 Partner Posts
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potentially dangerous link to nuclear weapons is a quite popular topic these days. Some of it is because nobody really knows what the role of AI can be. It is a (relatively) new and quite exciting technology and it seems to offer some benefits in assessing complex situations.
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Joe Biden: The U.S. Won’t Back Down from the Challenge of Putin and Hamas

Joe Biden November 18, 2023 Partner Posts
Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
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Redefining Success in Ukraine

Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan November 17, 2023 Partner Posts
A New Strategy Must Balance Means and Ends.
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