Articles and Essays

Today, the world marks the tragic anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The good news is that Ukraine won the first year of this war. The bad news is that the war continues, with no plans from Russian leader Vladimir Putin to retreat or negotiate. He’s playing a long game, expecting the collective West to eventually lose interest. We cannot allow that to happen. Indeed, it is in America’s interest to stay the course and help Ukraine achieve victory.

For twenty years, the Russian autocrat enjoyed a string of good fortune in coming to power and cementing his rule. He had raised Russia’s standing in the world. Then he invaded Ukraine.

Nearly a year after he invaded Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has failed to achieve any of his major objectives. He has not unified the alleged single Slavic nation, he has not “denazified” or “demilitarized” Ukraine, and he has not stopped NATO expansion. Instead, the Ukrainian military kept Russian troops out of Kyiv, defended Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and launched successful counteroffensives in the fall so that by the end of 2022, it had liberated over 50 percent of the territory previously captured by Russian soldiers that year. In January, Putin removed the

For two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin had a fantastic run. An accidental president plucked from obscurity by former President Boris Yeltsin in 2000, he came to power at the perfect moment, when oil and gas prices soared after a decadelong economic depression.

For decades, if not centuries, scholars have debated which matters more in international affairs: structural forces, such as the relative power between states, or the ideas and decisions of individual leaders. But at least as far as the United States is concerned, President Donald Trump may put the debate to rest.

With Bronte Kass | Understanding Putin’s Intentions and Actions in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election | According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the United States is a hostile power and a serious threat to Russian national interests. From his KGB days, Putin developed an analytical framework with regards to international politics, which cast the United States as the central enemy of the Soviet Union. His ideas evolved over time. After September 11, 2001, for instance, Putin pivoted towards greater cooperation with President George W. Bush in a common fight against terrorism. During

Michael McFaul served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and was a key architect of former President Barack Obama’s Russia strategy. McFaul later had strained relations with the Kremlin and was banned from traveling to Russia; he also played a cameo role in U.S. President Donald Trump’s notoriously compliant Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year, when Putin floated the idea of allowing his investigators question McFaul in exchange for U.S. access to Russian military intelligence officials from the GRU indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for

Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia for so long that it’s hard to imagine Russia without him. He has been Russia’s central decision maker as president or prime minister for nearly two decades, with six more years left in his current presidential term and the possibility of amending the constitution to remain in power even longer. He is likely to go down in history as one of Russia’s longest-serving leaders—though he still has many years to go to match Ivan the Terrible, who was tsar for more than five decades.

U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the world earlier this week when, standing side by side with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he refused to accept the basic facts of the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump appeared to back Putin over his own intelligence community, saying during a press conference in Helsinki, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that hacked into Democratic Party servers. In that one answer, Trump guaranteed that the Helsinki summit would become a historic moment in U.S.-Russian relations. Although he later tried to reverse

Looking ahead to the Helsinki summit, FSI director Michael McFaul recalls President Obama’s first meeting with then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in 2009. Excerpt: From Cold War to Hot Peace, published with permission from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.