Word: medvedevs
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IRAN A Threat or a Neighbor? While Washington has watched Iran's postelection chaos with growing alarm, Moscow has mostly looked the other way. Medvedev and Putin made no mention of the massive protests in Tehran or the allegations of vote-fixing when Ahmadinejad visited Yekaterinburg. That's because Russia's interests in Iran have always been strategic. "Iran is a special relationship for them," says Eugene Rumer, a senior fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. "It is their entry point for Middle East politics. It's a country they don't want...
GEOPOLITICS The Near Abroad Just as Russia won't help much on Iran, Obama will likely tell Medvedev and Putin that America's ties with Ukraine and Georgia are based on shared values - they're both democracies - and strategic interests, including the protection of vital oil and gas supply routes. To underscore that point, Biden plans to visit Kiev and Tbilisi shortly after the President's trip to Moscow. The Vice President's visit, says Blacker, will "demonstrate to the Russians that we have equities in the region." (See pictures of Joe Biden...
NUCLEAR WEAPONS Back to the Future When they met in London in April, Obama and Medvedev voiced an eagerness to conclude a new nuclear-weapons treaty before the end of the year, and the expiration of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which restricts the number of nuclear weapons both countries can deploy. This is an area where the two countries have a long record of negotiations: the two phases of START - the first ratified in 1991, just before the Soviet Union collapsed, and the second signed in 1993 - led to an 80% reduction in the worldwide number of strategic...
Recently, however, Medvedev and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, have said nuclear-weapons reductions are possible only if the U.S. drops its plans to expand its missile-defense shield into Eastern Europe. The U.S. argues that such defenses, including installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, are necessary to protect the West from a possible missile strike by Iran. The Russians don't buy that. The shield, it thinks, is designed to give the U.S. an edge against Russia. "We don't believe that any plans for [missile defense] have anything to do with the 'Iranian threat,'" Sergei Ryabkov, Russia...
...measure of Russia's two rulers. Bush famously looked into Putin's soul during their first meeting, in Slovenia in 2001, and "found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy," a judgment that quickly looked hopelessly naive. Obama will want to gauge the true nature of the Putin-Medvedev duopoly. See pictures of Putin...