The Kremlin is now frantically looking for tools to strengthen its censorship of the internet, which is perceived as a ‘Trojan Horse’ of the American secret services. This ‘besieged fortress’ rhetoric has been accompanied by a flood of repressive laws, increasing surveillance, and attempts to establish state sovereignty over the Runet.

The Sputnik V vaccine was an incredible achievement for Russian science. The measure of success however, will depend on the ability to vaccinate a majority of the Russian population in order to reach herd immunity.

With every step taken by the Russian authorities, the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine becomes ever more difficult. How can Ukraine claim back rights to a territory that citizens of another country de facto own?

On March 20th 2021, decree number 201 of the President of the Russian Federation came into force. According to this ruling, the majority of the Crimean Peninsula, around 80 per cent of the territory – only excluding a few municipalities and a small part of the city of Sevastopol – is gaining the status as a border territory of the Russian Federation. This decree might well be the final nail in the coffin of Ukrainian Crimea.

Ukraine’s gas transmission system is one of the most extensive networks of gas pipelines in the world. The role of the Ukrainian system, in the functioning of the pan-European gas transit infrastructure, is extremely important in the strategic economic and energy security contexts of life in Europe.

When we talk about Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2, we cannot consider these large-scale projects in economic terms alone. What is more, from the point of view of financial and technical indicators, they are not justified. The capacity of the Ukrainian gas transmission system (GTS) at the entrance is 281 billion cubic meters per year with an output of 146 billion m3 per year. Almost 50 per cent of natural gas from Russia to European countries until 2019 was transported via the Ukrainian GTS. Today, unfortunately, the situation is not the same.

Steps towards managing the European Union’s relations with Russia need a long-term perspective and a corresponding political dynamic that requires audacity. The once commonly-held vision of co-operative security in Europe, enshrined in the OSCE’s founding documents, may seem unachievable now, but it should not be lost out of sight.

When the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny released the video “Putin’s palace” in January 2021, upon his return to Russia from Germany after being poisoned with a military-grade substance called Novichok in August 2020, the showdown began. No doubt, Navalny and his political organisation have always been a thorn in the Russian regime’s side. Yet the stakes have risen since investigative journalists revealed the details of the poisoning as being carried out by Russian intelligence agents. Since then the “Berlin patient” seems to have been elevated to public enemy number one by the Russian ruling regime.

Over the last five to seven years, there has been a growing understanding in the West that engagement in the post-Soviet area needs to be differentiated. As much as we need to keep communication channels open in order to prevent the emergence of new divisive blocs, we must not forget about our values and what stands behind them. Therein lies the potential to build, to improve and to unite. A positive agenda is all the more important given what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed.

We will all remember 2020 as the year when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. The rapid spread of the virus brought significant changes to our lives: closed borders, businesses closing and limited social interactions. More importantly, it forced us to rethink the present and the future – an exercise that is increasingly needed as the scale of challenges continues to overwhelm us. At the dawn of 2021, the world’s attention has been drawn to the first steps to sort things out – namely, the vaccination process.

A review of Russia Resurrected. Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order. By: Kathryn E. Stoner. Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2021.

A review of the film Dear Comrades! directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, Russia, 2020.

The Eastern flank of the NATO alliance might well be safer than ever before in a physical sense. However, warfare through information means, social and economic matters internally and geopolitical shifts externally could eventually lead to more troubling changes down the line.

Russia would wish the security situation return to a pre-2014 status quo ante, but only in the sense of Allied troops leaving NATO’s eastern flank. That is impossible, as long as Russia continues to heavily militarise its western and southern rims from the Arctic to the Caspian Sea, and refuses to recognise its role in the conflict with Ukraine.

A review of Negotiating the New START Treaty. By: Rose Gottemoeller. Publisher: Cambria Press, New York, 2021.

“Not only is Manizha not Russian, but she’s not even a person, she’s… salt!” declared the professor, as he revealed the result of an experiment conducted on the pop star’s skeleton. The research was ordered following widespread public discussion about who exactly Russia was sending to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam.