Author: Stefan Hedlund, Professor for Russian Studies in Sweden.

Pressing Harder

A three-part negotiating process is set to start this coming week: On January 10, Russia and the US will hold talks on security guarantees in Geneva. On January 12, Russia will discuss its security concerns and its security guarantees projects at the Russia-NATO council meeting in Brussels and at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting in Vienna on January 13.

Russia has a multitude of capabilities and venues for political influence. Some of these assets are controlled by Russian intelligence or other state organs, while others share values or sympathize with Russia. Russia has a whole-of-government approach to influence and can employ the entire state apparatus for this purpose.

Alphabetical Listing

​Alphabetical Listing

Society Permeability 

The GLOBSEC Vulnerability Index measures vulnerability towards foreign influence in eight countries: Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is the most resilient and 100 the most vulnerable. It assesses five key dimensions: public attitudes, political landscape, public administration, information landscape, and civic and academic space

Public Attitudes

1. The non-kinetic scenario: Russia uses the military buildup to try to extract concessions from the West on NATO enlargement. Russia’s strategic goal here is to keep Ukraine distanced from organizations like NATO and the European Union. The most effective way for Russia to achieve this goal is by keeping the conflict in eastern Ukraine “frozen”—meaning that the major fighting stops, but localized fighting remains without a conclusive end to the conflict. That means using the troops on the border as political leverage, not as actual invaders.

1. From the standpoint of De Gaulle, any coherent Europe had to be a Europe of independent nation-states with their own unique histories and cultures in which national sovereignty would always control the European institutions. Moreover, a strong and legitimate united Europe could only be the outcome of cooperation between individual countries rather than by merging them. Gaullism is the idea that the fundamental unit of international politics is a nation-state built on people with a particular history. A state is the institution of a people, e.g. French, British, Polish etc.

1. US-Russia bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue ( Geneva, Jan 9-10)  Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman