President Obama, in Russia, talking nukes and geopolitics. We’ll hear from former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and more.

U.S. warships, Russian warships, and the bold pirates of the Somali coast. We look at high stakes piracy on the high seas.

Beyond the “Russian Bear” cliches. We’ll talk with an architect of NATO’s expansion, and one of the policy’s top critics, about what Russia’s invasion of Georgia really means for the West.

As Russia rolled into Georgia, and the West struggled to respond, we looked at how the conflict exploded and what’s at stake in the Caucasus.

Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia. Now he’s in prison and desperate to get out. We talk with the Bronx attorney who’s his lead legal strategist about power and the law in oil-rich Russia.

Russians went to the polls yesterday and handed Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections. It came as no surprise — for weeks, election watchers have pointed to massive voter intimidation.
Putin, as he asserts his “moral authority” to lead Russia, may be an old-style Russian strong-man — but his grip [...]

Renowned historian Orlando Figes has shed fresh light on the darkest chapter of Russian history — the 25-year reign of Joseph Stalin, from the late 1920s to his death in 1953.
The Great Purge and the Gulag rank with the 20th century’s worst crimes. The numbers — the 700,000 shot in one year during the purge, [...]

“On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia and war began,” goes Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace.” “That is,” wrote Tolstoy, “an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.”
And in a pair of lines, we are deep in [...]