How do Russia and the West see one another? What are the experts’ views on the confrontation between Russia and the West? How do the pundits explain the Russo-Ukrainian war and Russia’s Syrian gambit? What are the roots of the mythology about Russia in the West, and why has the West failed to predict and understand Russia’s trajectory? These questions and more will be discussed in this essay and in the series to follow.

Russian recklessness is aimed at coercing the West into accepting a grand bargain on the Kremlin’s terms. But whether it accepts or rejects this bargain, the West (and Russia) will pay a heavy price.

The third act of Russia’s civilizational drama is near. The price Russia and the outside world will pay for the end of the former’s system will be much higher than they paid for the Soviet Union’s demise.

Germany has historically been closely intertwined with Russia, and in recent years Germans have been intimately involved in helping Russia’s personalized power system to survive. But all that may now be changing.

The Russia-China partnership poses more problems for Moscow than it does for the West.

The Kremlin is sending a message to the West’s Russia experts: if you want to talk to us, you need to toe the line.

An analysis of the Kremlin’s “Weimar syndrome”, and why so many Western elites believe in it.

Or was Putin’s disappearing act just the dress rehearsal for the looming collapse?

A father of four and a charismatic, tireless opposition leader was gunned down just outside the Kremlin yesterday. A horrible new day has dawned on Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

How the West uses a collection of “myths” about Russia to deceive itself about its own impotence.