and russian officials, due to start in the new year. let s bring in dr domitilla sagramoso. she s an expert on russian foreign and security policy from king s college london. dr sagramoso, the rigour to speak to you on bbc news. thank you very much for talking to us. i won t ask you a detail about a very, very long news conference, but in a sense president putin has achieved something and getting nato members and president biden to agree that this kind of talk could take place at all, because presumably they would say, it s a matter of the sovereignty of the individual country, nothing to do with russia. do with russia. yes, i think from that point do with russia. yes, i think from that point of do with russia. yes, i think from that point of view, do with russia. yes, i think from that point of view, putin - do with russia. yes, i think from that point of view, putin has - do with russia. yes, i think from that point of view, putin has got| that point of view, putin has got the
Photo courtesy of Bruce Pannier
Christian Thorsberg, Circle of Blue
The border shared by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is a strip of hard-edged hills and scoured ridges. Apricot orchards occupy scarce flatlands and oxen graze on thinning fields of green.
Nearly half of the 600-mile border remains unofficial and non-delineated, a Soviet-era ambiguity with consequences that reverberate today. Drive for an hour through Kyrgyzstan’s southwestern Batken province and one might cross between the two countries a dozen times, depending on where your GPS was configured. Adding to the complexity, pockets of Tajik territory are nested within Kyrgyzstan.
Distrust among the region’s ethnic groups is exacerbated by extreme water insecurity. Snowy peaks in the distant Turkestan and Alai ranges are the source of fresh water in arid Batken, where irrigation canals and sanitation networks are vital yet crumbling. Most essential is the Golovnoy Water Intake Center, the dilapidated and lone water dis
Since Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, there has been no shortage of commentaries, articles, papers and entire volumes by Western academics, think-tankers, former policy practitioners and journalists on how Russian President Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Russian empire or how the Kremlin has never actually stopped building one. Still, there are some books on Russia’s external policies that I could not have missed, and
Russian Imperialism Revisited by long-time Russia scholar Domitilla Sagramoso is one of them.
Since Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, there has been no shortage of commentaries, articles, papers and entire volumes by Western academics, think-tankers, former policy practitioners and journalists on how Russian President Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Russian empire or how the Kremlin has never actually stopped building one. Even trying to skim all these books (which I have to in my line of work) could easily become overwhelming. As I have discovered since