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Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

Europe’s Last Dictator Steps Into the Unknown

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by Christian Davies in Foreign Affairs

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Belarus

Lukashenka remarked that if Crimea was an historically Russian territory, then virtually all of Russia itself should be given back to Mongolia and Kazakhstan because it had once been ruled by the Golden Horde

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My latest article, co-authored with Belarus specialist Paul Hansbury for Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab, takes a look at how Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenka (in the article, his name is written using the latin-Russian transliteration, Alexander Lukashenko) has tried to cope with the regional economic fallout of the Ukraine crisis. The article can be found here.

Paul and I describe Lukashenka’s dilemma: heavily dependent on Russia for its security and for much of its prosperity, Belarus cannot stray too far from Russian orbit, and yet its economy is being dragged down by a Russian economy suffering grievous harm from a combination of low oil prices and Western sanctions imposed since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

But there is a strong political dimension to this issue too. Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine, and its use of the language of having the right to ‘defend’ not only ‘ethnic Russians’ but ‘Russian speakers’ has spooked the leaders of many post-Soviet countries, especially those of Belarus and Kazakhstan.

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Tusk, Kaczyński, and Putin: A View From Moscow

18 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by Christian Davies in Foreign Affairs

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Poland, Russia

So the biggest problem Kaczynski was for Russia was that they were worried he was going to go and get himself killed?  For sure it was that, yes.  And it was not just a problem for Russia, it was also a problem for NATO.

Last month, I interviewed Maxim Samorukov, Deputy Editor of Carnegie.ru and an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Centre.

We discussed relations between Poland and Russia between 2007 and 2010, when Poland’s executive branch was divided between Law and Justice President Lech Kaczynski and Civic Platform Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the domestic and foreign policy context of the Smolensk catastrophe, and the Kremlin’s view of Poland’s present Law and Justice government, including the possibility of future co-operation.

‘The Ghosts of Smolensk’, an article I wrote for Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab about President Kaczynski’s contested legacy , can be found here.

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Xi Jinping in Britain: Submission Impossible

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by Christian Davies in Foreign Affairs

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China, Hong Kong, UK Foreign Policy

The Government is right to engage with China, and in doing so to make compromises along the way. But give the impression that your principles are a bit of a sham, and you will not get any credit for compromising on them

When I worked in Parliament, we used to receive dozens of petition e-mails each year expressing strong opposition to the Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China. Every year, at the Summer Solstice, thousands of dogs are slaughtered in Yulin in Guangxi province and served as hotpot. The petition demanded the British Government intervene in order to stop the ‘barbaric’ practice. Despite the expressed opposition of Simon Cowell and Ricky Gervais and hundreds of thousands of online petitioners, the practice continues.

The petitioners’ arguments – we do not regard dogs as animals to be eaten, therefore you must give up your ‘barbaric practice’ – are music to the ears of the Chinese authorities. They distract from elements of Chinese opposition to the festival (there is tension in China between proletarian dog-eaters and bourgeois dog-walkers), and help Beijing to argue that Westerners have always tried to impose their culture on China under the guise of universal human rights.

Chinese authorities can – and do – respond by arguing that Britain justified the Opium Wars with talk of ‘free trade’, and that support for ‘autonomy’ for Tibet and ‘rights’ for the Uighur in Xinjiang are designed to encourage seditious forces to weaken China; ‘democratic reform’ is designed to undermine the Chinese Communist Party, the one political system that managed to get China off its knees.

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Reporting on ‘Hybrid War’ in Ukraine

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by Christian Davies in Foreign Affairs

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Russia, Ukraine

The purpose of Russian propaganda is not to convince reporters on the ground who can see the truth for themselves, but to sow doubts in the minds of those who struggle to identify lies from afar.

Kiev – In August 2014, six months after the departure of former President Viktor Yanukovych and the initiation of Russian military operations in Crimea, shrines to the fallen and barricades that had long taken on a commemorative quality vied for space on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti with encampments inhabited by protestor-fighters who either refused to abandon a revolution they regarded as incomplete, or had nowhere else to go.

Slightly less shabby – in most cases – were the foreign correspondents frequenting the bars and cafes around the Maidan’s periphery and its surrounding streets. They gather to socialise, compare notes and conduct interviews, moving back and forth between their temporary bases in the capital and the numerous fronts in the east of Ukraine. Their experiences, and those of many of their colleagues, help us to understand not only the challenges of reporting on the Ukraine crisis, but also how both warfare and journalism have undergone similar processes of fragmentation and change.

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Recent Posts

  • Polish PM Angers Human Rights Campaigners with Plans to Shake Up NGOs
  • New Polish Military Force Worries Political Opposition
  • Poland Exhumes President Lech Kaczyński’s Remains
  • Polish Women Vow to Step Up Pressure Over Abortion Restrictions
  • Poland’s Abortion Ban Proposal Near Collapse After Mass Protests
  • Women To Go On Strike in Poland in Protest at Planned Abortion Law
  • Europe’s Last Dictator Steps Into the Unknown
  • Poland’s New Nationalism: In Conversation with Aleks Szczerbiak
  • Poles to the Right of Jarosław Kaczyński
  • Britain: An Unhappy Country Seeking Catharsis

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Kenton on The Ghosts of Smolensk

Recent Posts

  • Polish PM Angers Human Rights Campaigners with Plans to Shake Up NGOs
  • New Polish Military Force Worries Political Opposition
  • Poland Exhumes President Lech Kaczyński’s Remains
  • Polish Women Vow to Step Up Pressure Over Abortion Restrictions
  • Poland’s Abortion Ban Proposal Near Collapse After Mass Protests

Recent Comments

Kenton on The Ghosts of Smolensk

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