Report Russia

The Russian proposal to create ‘de-escalation areas’ in Syria has triggered further fears of Syria’s fragmentation, with the ‘de-escalation areas’ seen as providing the building blocks for the ‘federalisation’ of Syria supposedly envisaged by the draft constitution for Syria which the Russians circulated to the participants of the Astana conference a few weeks ago.
These fears are by no means unfounded.  There are many factors within Syria that work against the reunification of the country into a unitary state.  However I doubt the Russians are one of them.

Publication of the Memorandum setting up the ‘de-escalation areas’ signed by the representatives of Russia, Turkey and Iran at the Astana conference, together with certain comments about them by representatives of the Russian and Syrian governments, have clarified their intended purpose.

Russian President Vladimir Putin rounded off three days of non-stop diplomacy with a telephone conversation with US President Trump and a meeting with Turkish President Erdogan.  This came directly after his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Putin obviously discussed the Syrian conflict with all three.  Moreover it is known that over the course of the same discussions Putin mooted with all three of them – but especially with Trump and Erdogan – a new Russian proposal for something the Russians are calling ‘de-escalation zones’.

Russian President Vladimir Putin used his press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to make some of his harshest comments for some time about the situation in Ukraine, and to pronounce the Minsk process which is supposed to lead to a Ukrainian peace settlement all but dead.  He also came close to blaming Merkel for its failure.
In doing so President Putin, whilst continuing to give lip-service to the Minsk Agreement, all but admitted that the chance of it ever being implemented has gone

As the crisis between the US and North Korea waxes and wanes, a commonly expressed view is that it is not a real crisis at all but an exercise in ‘bait and switch’, an attempt both to draw attention away and to justify the activation of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system to South Korea, which has now been activated.

Angela Merkel met Vladimir Putin for the first time in Moscow in 2 years, her last visit there being a brief visit she made in 2015 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Victory In Europe.
Apart from that one meeting, which it was impossible politically for Merkel to avoid, Merkel’s visit to Moscow today is her first visit there since her negotiation with Putin in February 2015, which took place in the run-up to the signing of the Minsk Agreement.
Merkel has avoided to Moscow since then, and has signalled her disapproval of visits there by other German politicians.

Despite President Trump’s recent policy reversals, talk from within the administration claims he still personally wants better relations with Russia, though most of the officials within his administration supposedly disagree with him 

A few weeks ago protests in Russia called by the Western-backed ‘liberal’ opposition activist and blogger Alexey Navalny attracted a disproportionate amount of attention in the Western media.  This was despite the fact that the turnout in those protests – probably in the region of 15-20,000 people across the whole country (not the 60,000 people the ‘liberal opposition’ itself claims) – was hardly impressive.
Since then there have been two other attempts to stage more such protests.

The reason why Chinese President Xi Jinping recently felt driven to send a personal message to Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirming China’s friendship and de facto alliance with Russia became all too clear when then Trump administration published on the White House website on Thursday 27th April 2017 a list of its foreign policy achievements in its first 100 days.

Russia’s President Putin has met in the Oval Hall of the Kremlin with Li Zhanshu, Director of the General Office of the Communist Party of China, and chief of staff of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The meeting was held directly after Li Zhanshu held talks with his Russian counterpart Anton Vaino, who is the head of the Russian President’s Executive Office and who is President Putin’s chief of staff.