Rossiiskaya Gazeta

The year 2015 is a year of many jubilees – 70 years since the Great Victory and the end of the Second World War; 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany; and 40 years since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act and the subsequent creation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

A new center of economic development will emerge in Central Eurasia The long-term deterioration of relations with the West, hopefully less dramatic in the future than now, and the need for restructuring foreign economic relations, largely malformed during the years of disintegration and chaotic attempts to restore them, make the partial economic turn to the East all the more necessary.

EU leaders purposely crushed the Cypriot banking system so as to frighten other debtors Just to get this straight, I don’t have any secret information on the real reason for the Eurogroup’s sudden ultimatum to Cyprus on taxing deposits, that is, to expropriate them partially in exchange for European loans, without which the banking system would collapse.

The “reset” of Russian-U.S. relations has petered out as the new agenda for it never materialized and failed to give it an impulse and relations inevitable started to slide back.

This is, above all, an unprecedentedly swift redistribution of power in the economy, accompanied by an increasing redistribution of power in politics. The Europeans, who would until quite recently preach in arrogant tone, have come to the brink of humbly asking financial assistance from the still communist and rather hard-up Chinese.

In these circumstances, the question is not “Who will be the next president of Russia?” but rather “Will Russia overcome the inertia of stagnation, which is turning it into a country unable to maneuver and lead amid the chaos in the new, increasingly dangerous (although not directly threatening) world?