This year’s session of the annual Valdai International Discussion Club was organized in hybrid fashion, with most participants attending in person but some (myself included) choosing to participate remotely. Indeed, the pictures from the conference hotel in Krasnaya Polyana, high in the mountains above Sochi, provided a sharp contrast with what was happening in the rest of Russia: While the participants sat unmasked next to each other in a crowded auditorium, the number of COVID-19 cases in the country was rising dramatically—so much so that President Vladimir Putin ordered Russians to take a week of paid leave and stay home in the hope that the pandemic would subside.

The Valdai Discussion Club began in 2004 as a project to bring foreign Russia experts to Russia to meet with Russian counterparts and also meet with senior officials, including Putin (and Dimitry Medvedev when he was president). It has evolved from a small group of international Russia experts discussing Russian affairs, into a large gathering in which Russia features as one of many global actors and whose format now resembles Davos more than the earlier, more intimate meetings. In the early years, Russian participants included politicians and journalists from the democratic opposition, but they are no longer invited, with the exception of Nobel Peace Prize winner and Novaya Gazeta editor Dimitry Muratov, who attended this year’s session.

The discord of American politics, U.S. military engagements abroad, the English-language dark web—all these offer myriad opportunities for criticism. And Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of them with gusto after his June 16 Geneva summit with U.S. counterpart Joe Biden. One journalist called Putin’s deft deflection of tough questions from reporters “a masterclass in whataboutism”—which might be defined as the strategic practice of deflecting criticism with counter-accusations against the criticizer, while implying hypocrisy and/or ignoring circumstances that could weaken one's argument but not addressing the original criticism.

This tactic was frequently employed by the Soviet Union in response to Western criticism of its domestic and foreign policies, with America most often in the crosshairs. One early use of whataboutism—a term coined much later in the West—followed a speech made by then U.S. Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman in 1947, in which he warned that Soviet totalitarianism was “a new and more threatening imperialism.” In response to Harriman’s remarks, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg published a commentary in Pravda that the Christian Science Monitor described as saying that Americans wanted “to drop atom bombs on the Soviet Union because they do not like its social order” but that the Soviet people, “though they consider racial laws and slavery in the southern states of the United States insulting to human dignity, do not intend on that account to turn modern weapons against Mississippi or Georgia.” Ehrenburg also asked how the United States could be disgusted by Nazi atrocities when it has, in the Monitor’s rendition, “ghettoes for Negroes and lynch courts?” By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, accusations of America “lynching Negroes” had become a punchline for irreverent jokes about Soviet officialdom’s own hypocrisy and, as an Economist correspondent wrote in 2008, “a synecdoche for Soviet propaganda as a whole.”

Speakers of every language have their verbal tics, but one Russian phrase seems to resurface constantly in official or semi-official speech and writing—particularly when it comes to comparisons with the West: “no worse and even better than.” Some of these “no worse” propositions go back as far as the 18th century, to the reign of Russia’s first emperor, Peter the Great, who was also, perhaps, the first Russian ruler to prioritize adopting Western know-how to make the Russian state more capable of competing with Europe’s leading powers. As early as 1724, Ivan Pososhkov, Peter I’s contemporary and a supporter of his reforms, wrote in his critique of mercantilism: “God has blessed us Russians with grain and honey and all matter of drinks. We have a countless plentitude of vodkas; our beers are top-notch and our honeys superb … no worse than from the Rhine, and much better than bad ones from the Rhine.”1

Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the use of “no worse” persisted as the emergent Soviet state continued to compete with the West. With its people short on personal freedoms and high-quality consumer goods, the Bolshevik leadership emphasized all the ways in which the Soviet state was “no worse and even better than” the West as the two wrangled in global competition. The dissolution of the USSR 30 years ago did not end the “no worse” habit. In recent years, Russian officials, business leaders and journalists have applied this convention to everything from missile technologies and special forces to wine and tornadoes. Their counterparts in other former Soviet countries have retained a similar taste for the “no worse” trope.

The Levada Center recently polled Russians on their attitudes toward Russia’s general standing in the international community, as well as their attitudes toward strategic competitors and countries within the post-Soviet neighborhood. Polling shows an improvement in attitudes toward the U.S., EU and Ukraine following unfavorable public opinion trends in the spring of 2021. Likewise, positive attitudes toward Georgia have been making steady improvements since 2018. However, Russian attitudes toward China have worsened since the beginning of 2021.

When asked about Russia’s presence on the global stage, respondents feel that Russia is isolated and viewed as a competitor by developed nations. Nevertheless, a majority of Russians want a more positive relationship with the West.

If geopolitics abhors vacuums, then who will fill the void created by the U.S. departure from Afghanistan? One player that may be in a position to fill some of that void is the Shanghai Security Organization (SCO), in my view. Since its prototype was established in 1996, the SCO has evolved into a viable organization for regional security and defense cooperation, and there is no doubt that most, if not all, of its members, share an urgent interest in keeping instability from spilling over from Afghanistan. However, while the SCO should be expected to try to act on that collective interest, it is doubtful that any of its members, even leading giants Russia and China, will be able to fully fill the shoes left by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan.  

The change of power in Kabul has been quite abrupt, catching many regional watchers off guard, as evidenced, for instance, by a commentary published by the Diplomat in mid-July arguing that it was time for the SCO to accommodate the Ashraf Ghani government’s requests for Afghanistan to join the organization. In the wake of the subsequent demise of Ghani’s regime and the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul, there is hardly a neighboring country left that would not be interested in joining forces with some of the regional powers to defend themselves from threats emanating from the (yet again) destabilized Afghanistan. Individual SCO members are no exception, and there is no doubt they will devote the lion’s share of their Sept. 16-17 summit in Dushanbe to the Afghanistan formulating a collective strategy to respond to these threats. These threats include a deadly resurgence of al-Qaida, the Islamic State and other jihadist groups, a dramatic increase in the transit of refugees, and continued drug trafficking.

In 2001, then-Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov claims to have told the Taliban to "f--- off” in response to the group’s alleged offer to team up with Moscow against the United States. This bears contrasting with recent statements by Russian officials, such as  Vladimir Putin’s special representative for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov and Russia’s ambassador in Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov. “If we compare them in terms of the ability to negotiate with colleagues and partners, the Taliban has long demonstrated a much better ability to negotiate than the puppet government,” TASS quoted Kabulov as saying.  "They made a good impression on us, adequate men, well armed,” Russia’s ambassador in Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov said in reference to members of the Taliban, which at present is designated by the Russian government as a banned terrorist organization.

The perspectives of Russia’s non-government Middle East experts on the ascent of the Taliban and its impact on Russia appear to be more varied than those of Russian diplomats and their other official counterparts. We have compiled a selection of such views, along with views on the same expressed by Western FSU watchers.

Russia’s Voronezh Joint-Stock Aircraft Building Company has begun work on a plane designed to enable Russia’s military-political leadership to exercise nuclear command, control, and communications (N3) in the event of a nuclear war while airborne. The design of the aircraft—nicknamed “Judgement Day Plane” by the Russian media—is based on the long-range white-body airliner Il-96-400M, which was developed by the Moscow-based design bureau of the Ilyushin Aviation Complex, part of Russia's state-owned United Aircraft Corporation.

The N3 plane, which is being built as part of the so-called Zveno-3S project, which was first mentioned in the media in 2016, will carry domestically made equipment only and that equipment would allow those on board to send launch commands to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), including stationary missiles in silos and mobile missiles, as well as to submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) carried by submerged vessels up to 6,000 km away, according to a report by Russia’s state-funded RIA Novosti news agency. The plane can apparently remain airborne for days thanks to its ability to refuel in midair, which is a feature it shares with its U.S. counterpart, the E-4B. If not refueled, new plane will still have double the flight range of its predecessor, which was named Il-80 (NATO code: Maxdome) and which was based on Ilyushin’s Soviet-era Il-86 airliner.

“The plan is to replace [the IL-80] with IL-96-400M aircraft. This will significantly increase the time of airborne combat duty of command posts and increase the coverage area of command and control,” a source in Russia’s aircraft-building industry told TASS in October. The Russian Defense Ministry reportedly operates four Maxdomes at the moment.

Should the U.S and Russia agree on a set of cyber rules and is doing so even possible? The answer according to a recent U.S.-Russian exploratory paper we published, is yes, but not yet. The answer according to Elena Chernenko, head of Russian daily Kommersant’s international news desk, and Joe Nye, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, as provided during a July 20 event at The Center for the National Interest was also affirmative, with both speakers pointing to U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement of 1972 as a model for a bilateral cyber deal.

In their remarks at the event Chernenko and Nye both cautioned against aiming for anything as grand as a cyber treaty. Nye noted that Russia has been proposing such a treaty for the past 20 years at the United Nations, but said that in his view, this is simply unrealistic because it would be unverifiable. He also noted that a U.S.-Russian cyber agreement, even if reached, could be derailed by adverse developments in other spheres of the bilateral relationship. He went on to suggest that while it is possible that the sides would be able to reach an agreement in the cyber domain that would remain effective for a little while, the risk is it could then become increasingly ignored, particularly if bilateral relations continue to deteriorate, as was the case with the 1972 agreement. Chernenko concurred with Nye’s proposition that Moscow and Washington should aim for an agreement rather than a treaty that would need to be ratified.

Nye added that with or without an agreement, the United States should continue to focus on deterrence with respect to Russia and to other state and non-state actors. He invoked a noisy party analogy when describing how that deterrence would work.

Vladimir Putin has just signed off on Russia’s new National Security Strategy. As with any such strategic document, it is useful to compare it to its predecessor, if only to identify key changes in the Kremlin’s vision of what constitutes Russia’s national security and how to attain it. My comparison between the 2021 document and its 2015 predecessor reveals that the Kremlin has strengthened its determination to deter the West and engage the East (Asia), which it sees, respectively, as declining and rising, while starting to pay more attention to domestic components of national security, such as human capital.

When the previous strategy was adopted in 2015, many analysts suspected that relations between the West and Russia had already hit rock bottom following the intervention in Ukraine that the Kremlin launched in 2014 with some hoping for an eventual rebound, if only a partial one. The new document shows that that bottom was false, with multiple layers underneath ripe for the further deterioration of Russia’s relations with the United States and its allies, even as Moscow’s partnership with Asia’s leading powers remained strong (India) or strengthened further (China).

While the 2015 strategy contained clauses for cooperation with the United States and the European Union, with multiple goals to be pursued jointly, and even for the development of relations with NATO, the 2021 version contains no such language when describing Russia’s interaction with what the Kremlin sees as a declining West. Moreover, the new document does not mention the European Union at all, indicating that in the Russian leadership’s view, the European Union no longer matters—at least in matters of national security (and never mind that it remains Russia’s largest trading partner).

While lessons learned from regional military conflicts accounted for our most popular reads in January through June 2021, topics ranging from climate change to cybersecurity also dominated top positions in our ranking. Read on for a look at Russia Matters' top 10 most popular stories, based on reader analytics captured during the first half of this year. 

1. A Look at the Military Lessons of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: In this analysis,  director of the Russia Studies Program at CNA examines the implications of the war over Nagorno-Karabakh which continue to reverberate well outside the region given its potential significance for regional and great powers alike, while further spurring debates on the character of modern warfare. 

2. Who ‘Defeated’ ISIS? An Analysis of US and Russian Contributions: There can be little doubt that the United States and its allies played a much bigger role that Russia did in subduing ISIS, the author, a lecturer in security and development at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, asserts in this analysis; but ISIS has plenty of life in it yet and any alleged victory is fragile.

3. Five Years After Russia Declared Victory in Syria: What Has Been Won? In this cost-benefit assessment, the author—a graduate student at Harvard University and a student associate at RM—questions whether Russia's intervention in Syria has paid off, or whether then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2015 prediction that the operation would end in a “quagmire” for Russia has come true.