Valdai Club

To the extent the Muellerinvestigation creates political problems for Trump, the best path for Congressional Republicans is to look tough on Russia in the hope of avoiding blame by association. The new year is likely to prove difficult for Trump, and for U.S.-Russia relations.

The lack of a consistent approach appears driven by a mix of Trump’s own erratic personality and the instability of the administration he heads, which is now on its third national security advisor in just over a year—and has also lost a secretary of state, a chief-of-staff, and multiple other senior officials in that time. Such chaos has bred incoherence across a range of policy issues, but few with as much potential for crisis as relations with Russia.

Valdai Club experts were polled on the results of 2013 and the most important events and people who influenced or changed international affairs The majority of the experts agreed that Vladimir Putin was Person of the Year.

At this year’s annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, the presence of the opposition and television cameras ratcheted up the pressure on Russian officials to give candid answers.

The summit meeting would have been useful as a way to reinvigorate the relationship, as a way to signal to the bureaucracies in both countries about what they needed to do in order to get the relationship moving again. There's always kind of a tension between having the two leaders meet in order to push the process forward, and then the role that the summit plays as a kind of symbolic message about the state of the relationship.

Given the political uncertainty which has permeated Russia since the parliamentary elections last year, tensions with the military represent a potentially dangerous liability for the Kremlin. Putin and his advisers no doubt recall that it was the military (and the KGB) that overthrew the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not the liberal intelligentsia.

Because of the other challenges that the United States is facing right now internationally from the euro zone crisis to the Arab Spring, there will be less focus on Russia which is not an immediate problem.

The North Caucasus retains an anomalous position within the Russian Federation – a kind of “internal abroad.” Since the Soviet collapse, most of the European population has left for the Russian interior, increasingly differentiating the North Caucasus from the rest of the country.

North Korea doesn’t really believe the offers of the international community of security in exchange for denuclearization. The country that they're most worried about is the United States.

The parliamentary elections are not going to have a major impact on Russia-US relations, but the upcoming presidential elections in Russia and the US have the potential to be more sensitive. If there is a sense that so-called Russian democracy is going into reverse, then there will be more pressure on the United States to respond.