Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

cipherbrief

Welcome! Log in to stay connected and make the most of your experience.

Input clean

Russia

The Terms We Must Set

On October 15, a Vietnamese state-owned tanker, the PVT Azura, departed St. Petersburg with 109,000 barrels of Russian diesel. It is due at Norfolk [...] More

The Latest

BLUF: Russian Strategic Culture Drives its Callous and Brutal Actions

My friends and family often ask me why Russia behaves so offensively. They are baffled by Russia’s lack of humanity and Moscow’s actions such as [...] More

Putin Is Testing the West’s Resolve

In the preface to volume one, “The Gathering Storm,” of his six-volume memoir of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalls a [...] More

Russia’s AI Blueprint Exposes an Authoritarian Playbook

Russia, China, and Iran are all sharing the same playbook for corrupting Western elections. The United States is on track to be the next target this [...] More

The Return of the Essential Art: Electronic Warfare and the Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War

A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer HoldsFor three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic [...] More

The West Must Tell Russians the Truth About the War

Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a [...] More

TOPSHOT-RUSSIA-UKRAINE-CONFLICT-WAGNER

The Continued Myth of Russia’s Imminent Collapse: Lessons from Prigozhin’s Mutiny Three Years On

KREMLIN FILES/COLUMN: Three years ago, in June 2023, the Kremlin confronted one of the most dramatic internal crises of Vladimir Putin's [...] More

The Succession Question Haunting the Kremlin

The late-June 2026 death of Sergei B. Ivanov - the man once thought the most likely successor to Vladimir Putin - as well as the Russian President’s [...] More

Putin’s Running Out of Scare Tactics and Options

Russian President Vladimir Putin can no longer conceal the cost of his Ukraine war from the Russian public. There are fuel shortages throughout the [...] More

The West Needs to Prepare for a Russian Defeat in Ukraine

We are good at winning wars and generally bad at what comes after. Far from a partisan observation; this is a pattern with receipts. We removed [...] More

Armenia Has Voted on a Pivotal New Direction, but Moscow is Not Ready to Concede

BLUF: Armenia, a small country of about 3 million people, is located at an important strategic crossroads among Europe, Russia, the Middle East and [...] More

Russia’s $11 Billion Soft Power Gamble

I was sitting in the front seat of a “Yandex Taxi” in Moscow in the summer of 2018, dropping off some friends after we had drinks together at a local [...] More

Russia’s Taliban Embrace Signals a New Power Shift in Afghanistan

Sometimes the only thing more frightening than Afghanistan’s problems is the Taliban’s solutions and the recently signed Russia-Taliban [...] More