Valdai Club

The new White House administration in the US has given rise to speculation about negotiations with Russia on the Ukrainian conflict. Newly elected US President Donald Trump has stated that the settlement of the conflict is a high priority task for the new authorities.  Russia has voiced its openness to negotiations based on the Istanbul agreements of 2022. After the inauguration of Trump in January 2025, a window of opportunity for negotiations may indeed open.

COP29 did not bring the global community closer to a single economic and environmental strategy in the development of the resources of the World Ocean, although the “blue economy” has claimed this role. This is primarily due to the fact that divergent economic interests still prevail over the idea of ​​​​unification in the name of combating global environmental threats, and this balance is unlikely to change over the short or medium term, Gleb Sugakov writes.

Ukraine has become the central instrument, but at the same time the most vulnerable link in the American strategy: the attempt to use Kiev as a lever of pressure on Russia has encountered fierce resistance from Moscow and centrifugal tendencies in the transatlantic camp itself. These processes may result in a rethinking of the role of the United States in Europe, and a gradual transformation of the entire system of international relations to a new multicentric format, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov.

The EU’s foreign policy is subject to external interference and non-EU strategies. Prolonged sole reliance on the NATO defence umbrella could create issues of double allegiance, where a member state of both will have to choose one over the other, potentially causing a disruption of the EU’s policies and even unity, Giacomo Famigli writes.

Despite the fact that all five Nordic countries have been members of NATO since 2024, there are divergent positions on participation, both among the founding countries (Denmark, Norway, Iceland) and among the new member countries (Finland and Sweden).

The United States, represented by Donald Trump, has exacerbated long-accumulated contradictions and unresolved problems in Danish-Greenlandic relations, and now Denmark has an additional and extremely effective incentive to continue expanding contacts with Greenland on foreign policy, the military, and security issues, investing more quickly and actively in the long-overdue modernisation of its Arctic presence, including with respect to defence. This has long been expected from Denmark by both the United States and other NATO member states, writes Nikita Belukhin, Junior Research Fellow at the Department of European Political Studies at IMEMO RAS.

France is under pressure either to become “EU only”, paying for Ukraine and other new EU candidates, thus with no remote dependences anymore, or to leave the EU and develop her empire according to her traditions. The Eurocratic tyrant chose the former option and is now paying the bill in Mayotte, Olivier Roqueplo writes.

The US sanctions regime against Syria remains in full force. The decrees will most likely be cancelled only if Washington is confident in a large-scale and irreversible change in Syria’s political course towards the expectations and interests of the US, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Ivan Timofeev.

The BRICS declarations quite clearly and unambiguously name the causes of many of today’s global problems. They are associated with the persistent inequality between the West and the Non-West, with the practices of neo-colonial exploitation that the West carries out in relation to developing countries. There are practically no such words in the declarations of the G20. Problems of global development seem to arise out of nowhere, and there is practically no analysis of their causes, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

The risks of limiting sea and air transit are significantly lower than the corresponding risks regarding road and rail communications. In this regard, special attention should be paid to the development of maritime infrastructure that ensures uninterrupted freight and passenger traffic, Vadim Voinikov writes.