International Affairs No. 2, 2023 – Table of Contents

It has been a tough year, like all of them recently. It is important that we are together and that we are not forgetting our comrades. Today, we commemorate the many we have lost over the past year. I ask you to join me in a minute of silence to honor their memory.

First of all, I would like to read out President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Foreign Ministry’s current staff and veterans:…

O Ancient World, before your culture dies, Whilst failing life within you breathes and sinks, Pause and be wise, as Oedipus was wise, And solve the age-old riddle of the Sphinx. That Sphinx is Russia. Grieving and exulting, And weeping black and bloody tears enough, She stares at you, adoring and insulting, With love that turns to hate, and hate – to love.

IN THE first decades of the 21st century, the international community of planet Earth has found itself confronted all at once with a chain of events, each of which could have defined an entire political era. The list looks impressive: dramatically aggravated US-Russian and US-Chinese relations; ruptured business and political ties between Moscow and Old Europe; the Russian Armed Forces’ Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine; the deepest postwar split between UN members on certain issues of international politics, etc. Any casual observer can easily see how unusual all this is and how shocking it is even to experienced international relations experts…

Keywords: megatrends: globalization, democratization, information and communication revolution, demassification, regenerative habitat

THE problem of determining megatrends – the key global processes that set the directions of civilizational development – has preoccupied scientists and scholars for decades owing to purely scientific considerations as well to the practical tasks of determining the future contours of planetary civilization…

OVER the past few years, we have been increasingly hearing the term “technological sovereignty.” It is not only discussed at Russian domestic venues but has also become a key issue on the international agenda. The significance and relevance of this issue are undeniable: Every day we witness and participate in the creation of a fundamentally new paradigm that is shaping the modern political and economic world order. We face new challenges and threats, and in countering these difficulties, we continue to gain more and more opportunities to realize our country’s potential. The domestic market and foreign economic relations are transforming rapidly and adapting to pervasive new realities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2022, named achieving technological sovereignty – and creating an integrated economic development system that does not depend on foreign institutions for critical components – one of several cross-cutting state development principles. “We need to develop all areas of life on a qualitatively new technological level without being simply users of other countries’ solutions. We must have technological keys to developing next-generation goods and services…. Many Russian AI and big data solutions are the best in the world…. Technological development is a cross-cutting area that will define the current decade and the entire 21st century,” the president noted…

INFORMATION and communications technology (ICT) is of paramount importance in the modern world. This statement is taking on new significance today. The fact is that, until very recently, humans were regarded as the primary source and consumer of information. With the advent of digital transformation mechanisms and use of the Internet of Things, most connections and the bulk of information are generated and consumed not by humans but by inanimate objects. And the distortion of information in this new space leads to threats that are more global than activities aimed at deception. By creating a world without borders through the total “connection of the unconnected,” humanity is becoming more vulnerable than ever. In this era of rapid data proliferation and the extreme vulnerability of individuals and entire nations to the dangers of information warfare, not only must we concentrate our efforts on providing truthful information to people, but we must protect against potential technogenic challenges.

Previously, we encountered only threats related to the posting of content containing materials of terrorist and extremist organizations; calls for inciting mass riots, carrying out extremist activity, participating in illegal mass events, and committing suicide; and promotion of a criminal lifestyle and the use of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances…

Keywords: technological revolution, children’s information security conventions, Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), Darknet, Russian Federation initiatives

THE world is on the cusp of a new technological revolution. The rapid development of advanced technology is already moving entire industries into the virtual realm. Global digitalization is penetrating all areas of social life. The contours of the emerging global information order are gradually taking shape…

Keywords: National Security Concept of the Russian Federation. National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, the Russian World, traditional values, Vladimir Putin’s speech in the [Kremlin’s] St. George Hall

IN RECENT months, amid NATO’s hybrid war against Russia, the search for a national ideology has intensified once again…

TODAY, amid accelerated globalization and the informatization of society, one of the most urgent tasks for states is to form a positive obraz [image, figure, representation – Trans.] and increase competitiveness in the international arena. Like any other country, Russia strives for recognition in the world. However, the approaches to the development of our country’s foreign policy image have varied significantly at various stages of the country’s development. In this regard, study of the peculiarities of the evolution of the concept of a country’s imidzh [a Western borrowing that has a more restricted usage in the fields of politics and public relations – Trans.], its content, and methods of formation, is of particular interest.

An imidzh formation policy is relatively new for Russia due to our country’s comparative youth: As a successor of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has existed since 1991. It is worth noting that in the early stages of its existence, modern Russia did not develop any holistic policy for forming its imidzh; moreover, for some time, it lost control over foreign policy imidzh formation, since the Soviet propaganda mechanisms were no longer functioning and an alternative to these mechanisms had not yet been invented…

Keywords: Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Greater Eurasian Partnership, world order, international law, transregional law

THE existing system of international relations has demonstrated its limited effectiveness time and again in recent years – and not just in 2022, with its shocking openness and rapid changes. Problems have been accumulating for decades, set aside, obscured. They should have been addressed by the multilateral institutions designed to reconcile the interests of their founding states based on the norms of international law, but they were not…

IN RECENT years, a new integration association, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), has been developing in the Eurasian space with the goal of successfully realizing its economic potential and creating a single market for goods, services, capital, and labor.

Civil society institutions also play a role in the successful integration process. This refers to the use by nonprofit organizations of the capabilities of public or popular diplomacy, which meets the requirements of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation [2]…

CONTEMPORARY politics in Spain is marked by extreme instability. The country has been plagued by a string of government crises, the fragmentation of political forces, and complicated electoral processes. But it is Catalan separatism that has dominated Spain’s domestic politics over the past decade. While initially a local phenomenon in the first few decades of its active existence, after Catalonia’s independence referendum in 2017, Catalan separatism has indisputably become a threat to Spain’s territorial integrity. It should be said that “separatism” is what politicians and scholars who champion Spain’s territorial integrity call Catalonia’s bid for independence; those seeking independence for the region prefer the terms “regionalism” and “nationalism.”

In general, “separatism” is a fair term, as the main objective of Catalonia’s nationalists is to separate the region from the Spanish kingdom and make it an independent state. But this does not change the nature of the problem: The issue is the main point on Spain’s domestic political agenda and affects practically all aspects of the country’s political, social, and economic affairs. The problem is effectively at an impasse, and the only way to break it is stable dialogue between the governments of Spain and Catalonia. Such dialogue is taking place but has yielded little progress over the last several years. One obstacle is that Catalonia’s nationalist groups are divided, which complicates negotiations for the central government. Moreover, far from the entire population of Catalonia wants the region to secede…

TODAY is December 20, 2022. In recent weeks, the situation in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija has been troubled and highly charged. Serbs in northern Kosovo have been at the barricades for more than 10 days now. For them, this is the only way to protect themselves from aggressive arbitrary action by the self-proclaimed Pristina “authorities” who are seeking – with the connivance or de facto support of their Western handlers – to gain control over the Serb-populated northern part of the province and enclaves south of the Ibar River. Belgrade has emphasized its commitment to finding a peaceful solution but has made it clear that it will not tolerate a new cycle of violence against Kosovo Serbs, whatever the cost.

The Kosovo issue has been the main threat to peace and stability in the Balkans for almost a quarter-century. The root cause here is the anti-Serb bias of the Washington-led collective West: disregard for the legitimate interests of Belgrade and the Kosovo Serbs and pandering to the separatist aspirations of the Kosovo Albanians in contravention of international law…

THE marking of a full 30 years of the post-Soviet space, which coincided with a severe global economic crisis and the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, are reason enough to revisit the question of what has happened along Russia’s Western borders. Since the early 1990s, the Russian expert community has adopted the Western paradigm of assessing transformation processes as a single model that can be applied at the very least from Tallinn to Chisinau, and at most from Vilnius to Dushanbe. It did not immediately become clear that in analyzing macroeconomic indicators, Western experts “tend to think globally or in regional terms, while studies of national specifics are few and far between, but this is precisely where the devil is.”¹

Is this one reason why Russian policy in neighboring countries is not effective enough? Proceeding from this, we will try to find answers to several difficult questions. How did it happen that Belarus is our strategic ally and Ukraine, alas, is our strategic opponent? Why did Lithuania, which received unique economic dividends from trade with Russia and Belarus, deliberately destroy economic ties with these countries and also pointedly sever relations with China? One reason for the situation that has evolved is obvious. “The ethnicization of the nation-state building process led to the principle of ethnic ownership of a certain territory being established in the…

THE SOVIET union disintegrated a little over 30 years ago in a geopolitical catastrophe that pushed Russia back several centuries in its spatial development. It lost some critically important territories within the Baltic-Black Sea-Caspian arc where the bulk of Russia’s rivalry has taken place with Pax Britannica and, later, Pax Americana.

Today, a new system of international relations is unfolding in a world led, if not dominated, by Western civilization, which for several centuries now has been successfully depriving its rivals of the status of imperial spaces (macroregions), pushing aside all potential rivals in the struggle for resources in the widest sense of the word (from human or informational to hydrocarbon) and integrating those rivals into a world order set up to suit its interests and civilizational ideas. It relies on military, economic, information, cultural, and elite technologies to transform its rivals into a periphery of secondary importance, to deprive them of a chance to successfully compete in the geopolitical arena. The countries in the periphery or semi-periphery of the system of the economic division of…

ON FEBRUARY 24, 2022, a Special Military Operation (SMO) of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation was launched in Ukraine to prevent new civilian casualties and a humanitarian disaster in Donbass, to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, to prevent Ukraine from becoming a nuclear power, and consequently, to protect the state interests and sovereignty of the Russian Federation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the citizens of Russia on February 24, 2022, states that the purpose of the SMO “is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine….”…

RECENTLY, the African continent has found itself at the center of Russian and foreign media attention. We see headlines such as “Fight for Africa,” “Bet on Cooperation,” “The Russians Are Coming,” and so on. Detailed discussions and conferences devoted to the problems and prospects of cooperation take place on various platforms. This revival is a result of the Russia-Africa Forum, which took place in 2019 in Sochi, giving a certain boost to Russia’s interactions with the continent’s countries and causing considerable anxiety in the Western countries that formerly colonized the continent. Preparations for the second large-scale Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg, scheduled for July 2023, are in full swing.

There is no doubt that Russia will find its niche at the new stage of interaction in the national interests of the country. Some positive results are already noticeable. However, under the new conditions of the emerging world order, the “entry” must be carefully thought out and planned…

THE 1970s saw the beginning of the large-scale process of various countries joining forces to protect intellectual property (IP) rights. The European Patent Convention, signed in 1973, is a set of general rules on patenting various kinds of inventions. African regional IP organizations play a special role in regional IP protection systems, and in this article, we examine their activities.

IP protection is an inalienable part of the mutual economic integration process that may involve countries constituting a geographical region. Protecting IP rights amounts to legal measures that are essentially the same in many countries…

TRADITIONALLY friendly Russian-Tunisian relations have a long history. They are successfully developing in various fields, filled with new content but invariably maintaining positive dynamics. A trusting political dialogue is combined with fairly robust trade and economic cooperation, including in such science-intensive industries as nuclear energy and space exploration. Ties are being strengthened in education and health care, including in the fight against the novel coronavirus infection. Russian language and culture maintain strong positions in Tunisia.

Against this backdrop, there is growing interest in common historical heritage. Many details of the formation of the first Russian diaspora in Tunisia, associated with the exodus from Crimea, the centennial of which was celebrated in 2020, are already well known. Back then, at the end of the Russian Civil War, 33 ships of the Black Sea squadron with our sailors and their families arrived in the Tunisian port of Bizerte from Crimea. Among them was Anastasia Manstein-Chirinskaya, an elder of the Russian community in Tunisia, who lived in this city almost all her life and taught mathematics at the local lyceum for many years. Noting the merits of this extraordinary woman, the Tunisian authorities named a square next to the Russian Orthodox Church in her honor. Today, the Russian Naval Squadron Museum, which she founded, operates in Bizerte…

“If you choose diplomacy as your profession, you should be aware that you are committing yourself to a round-the-clock job. All that really matters is doing your duty at any cost and following high standards in this work. Being a diplomat would primarily require you to mobilize all your resources, to be flexible, and naturally to possess extensive knowledge. For a diplomat, education is a never-ending process.” – Vladimir Zakharov

We are grateful for your cooperation with our journal. Your insightful, professional articles on subjects such as Chinese foreign policy, relations between Asia-Pacific countries, and activities by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are always welcomed by our audience. This is natural because your many years of experience as a Russian diplomat posted in China and afterward as deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are a guarantee of profound and detailed analysis of developments in Asia…

“The first, the grandest, and most decisive act of judgment which the Statesman and General exercises is rightly to understand … the War in which he engages, not to take it for something, or to wish to make of it something, which by the nature of its relations it is impossible for it to be.”

MY FORAY into Arab studies happened to coincide with an exacerbation of the situation in the Middle East and then with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, which to a certain extent influenced my interest in Middle Eastern affairs. The Middle East is a unique region of practically incessant fighting, due not just to the political, economic, ethnic, religious, and development differences of its countries, but also to the diverse influences from external players. The Middle Eastern countries have become the world’s main users of weapons, and weapons are not always the best means of achieving peace…

Keywords: Taliban Islamic Movement (TIM), Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, insurgent group, civil war, jihadist networks, foreign fighters, madrassa students, Northern Alliance, Pashtun majority, Muslim people

THE fall of Mohammad Najibullah’s regime in April 1992 led to the capture of Kabul by Afghan Mujahideen units, which subsequently faced a number of problems. The new authorities inherited state symbols (namely the capital), but state mechanisms were not functioning – the political elite had left the country, the army was divided along ethnic and religious lines, and the state had no institutions capable of generating income and managing economic resources…

Keywords: Georgy Chicherin, people’s commissar for foreign affairs, foreign policy, Soviet Russia, Soviet Union, national interests

MUCH has been written about Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin in Soviet and Russian works on history.¹ His life and work have been depicted by journalists, filmmakers, and novelists. Yet there are a few touches missing from his portrait. This article endeavors to examine some aspects of him as an individual and a public figure while avoiding banalities as much as possibility…

GERMANY’S intelligence establishment has come a long way in its 130 years of formation. Its history began with the secret police agency of the Hohenzollern empire, which was succeeded by the Abwehr (counterintelligence service) of the Weimar Republic. The Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), Germany’s current foreign intelligence agency, was founded in 1956 and is reputed to be one of the world’s best intelligence services.

The Gehlen Organization [1, 3] was a private German intelligence agency set up in June 1946 under the oversight of Reinhard Gehlen, a former chief of Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost, FHO), and eventually evolved into the BND. The idea of military and political cooperation between the US and Germany as a way to use Germany against the Soviet Union emerged during…

IN FALL 2022, St. Petersburg State University Press published an unusual book: Ho Chi Minh: Sun Tzu’s Laws of War, 1945-1946 [in Russian].* The book is available in both print and electronic versions.

The translator and commentator is Prof. V.N. Kolotov, Doctor of Science (History), head of the Department of History of Far Eastern Countries at St. Petersburg State University and director of the Ho Chi Minh Institute at the same university…