This year has seen warplanes and warships operated by U.S. and its allies, on one side, and Russia on the other side, continue to repeatedly engage in dangerous maneuvering in proximity of each other over the skies of Syria and in the Mediterranean Sea. The probability that these confrontations, if continued, would end in another shoot-out is not negligible. Therefore, leaders on both sides to take joint legal and practical steps to prevent their militaries from dragging them into an unintended armed conflict with each other. The July 13th sitting of the NATO-Russia Council offers a good opportunity to discuss these joint steps.

Despite containing a litany of customary anti-Western complaints, the Russian president's speech clearly showed that he’s willing to improve relations with the West once Russia and NATO complete announced deployments.

Siegfried Hecker and Graham Allison weigh in on the persisting threat of nuclear terrorism; Russia reforms its nuclear guard; Elbe Group urges U.S.-Russian cooperation against rising risk of nuclear terrorism; Belfer Center experts take stock of terrorist threats posed by ISIS.

When Azeri and Armenian forces started to fire at each other in the early hours of April 2, it seemed that this exchange would enter the history of the decades-long conflict as just another of many routine violations of the ceasefire, which the parties to the Karabakh conflict clinched in 1994. However, rather than subside, as many of the previous violations did, the initial clashes spread and escalated, lasting four days and leaving dozens dead on both sides in what became the worst outbreak of hostilities since the 1994 agreement. Intended or not, this escalation substantially increases probability that Armenians and Azeris may stumble into an all-out war even though the latter would not be in the current interests of either Baku or Yerevan or those great powers, which have traditionally played important roles in the South Caucasus.

Vladimir Putin’s Tuesday decision to scale down the Russian military campaign in Syria seems to have caught world leaders off their guard. But is the Russian leader’s declaration of mission accomplished really that surprising? A brief look at the list of Russia’s stated short-term objectives in Syria, which I formulated shortly after beginning of Russian air campaign, shows that Putin has attained all that he wanted — and made significant progress toward his longer-term objectives as well. Did the Russian air strikes prevent Bashir Assad’s government from losing control over the remaining part of Syria and enable his forces to eliminate most immediate threats to their positions, making frontlines more defensible?

Members of the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism weigh in on the Nuclear Security Summit, which will take place in Washington DC on March 31-April 1 and assess North Korea’s claim that it has tested a miniaturized hydrogen bomb; Belfer Center experts issue a report for the upcoming nuclear summit and visit Russia to discuss U.S.-Russian cooperation in the field of nuclear security.

The second anniversary of Ukraine’s Euromaidan is a time for reflection about whether ordinary Ukrainians improved their lot by throwing out President Viktor Yanukovych. For observers at the time, the answer was a resounding yes. Yanukovych, the thinking went, was as corrupt as they come. Sympathizers hoped that by removing him from power and electing Petro Poroshenko instead, Ukrainians would open the way for a transparent and honest democratic government ready to improve ordinary people’s lives.

Russia’s national interests in Syria do not hinge on continuation of Bashir al-Assad’s rule. Therefore, Vladimir Putin could be prepared let Assad go as long as Russia has a say in transition to the new government in Syria and that government agrees to honor Russia’s national interests at stake.

Members of the Initiative weigh in on prospects of international counter-terrorism cooperation in Syria and elsewhere; Belfer Center experts continue to assess implication of Iran’s nuclear programl; Elbe Group meets 7th time to discuss countering nuclear terrorism, other issues on bilateral agenda, and more.

Russia’s leaders and population are facing a number of long-term adverse trends, including inefficiency of the economy, insufficient quality of governance, pervasive corruption, fragility of demographic improvements, home-grown and transnational terrorism, instability in neighboring countries and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But the existence of these long-term trends, confluence of some of which, if unaddressed, could eventually come to pose very serious challenges to the Russian statehood, is no excuse for misunderstanding or distorting the current realities in Russia.