Russia in Global Affairs

Now as the political life has been paralyzed for a while, the political agenda is not disappearing, of course, it is becoming much more complex. Public diplomacy gets even more important than before, but certainly in this new post-pandemic world it should be different, and it should be much more practically oriented than it used to be.

A society that allows glaring inequality is likely to pay a higher price for getting out of the crisis caused by the pandemic. This means more deaths, greater impoverishment risks for a part of the population, and most likely a deeper crisis. So, addressing the problem of excessive income inequality is a prerogative for more than just social policy.

On June 22, at 13:30 - 15:55 Moscow time, the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce will hold an online conference, titled “Russia and the World 2021”, with participation of Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-chief of the Russia in Global Affairs magazine.

On May 18, 2020 at 3 p.m, the HSE University will host a presentation of the new analytical report titled “Protecting Peace, Earth, and Freedom of Choice for All Countries. New Ideas for Russia’s Foreign Policy”.

There is a danger that by focusing entirely on the pandemic Russia and the international community might get distracted from addressing fundamental problems―devising and implementing a new, future-oriented ideological base and agenda for Russia’s foreign policy.

Just like any pandemic, COVID-19 will not last forever. However, it will serve as a catalyst for disruptive changes in spheres with no immediate link to this virus. The world has accumulated a great number of problems, so a trigger was all it took to plunge the world into crisis.

A crisis is a moment of reflection in the life of a community. The response to a challenge is as important as the summons itself. In the case of Covid-19, the crisis is the most profound in living memory. Like a neutron bomb, it destroys people but not the physical infrastructure. It prowls unseen, and the threat of contagion pushes people apart. No less important, it undermines accustomed models of normality, the ‘common sense’ of an era, and breaks boundaries that had hitherto been sacrosanct.

In an open and interdependent world, we are all exposed to global sanitary and environmental degradations. Russia is no exception: it has gone into lockdown, with increasing economic and social costs adding up to the fall in oil and gas prices and upcoming impacts of the global recession.

Today, as the world is feverishly looking for means to cope with the economic and social havoc caused by the coronavirus crisis, potentially more important, but barely noticed, processes have started around the globe. The germs for these processes were seeded when the powers fought valiantly the Great Recession 2008; that is, the germination took almost twelve years.