What are the chances of a war that would exterminate most of humankind? It could be more likely than you think

Recently, together with my coworkers, I have been engaged in a statistical analysis of war over the past 600 years. The results were sobering: war, it seems, is a statistical phenomenon similar to earthquakes and forest fires. It strikes according to well defined statistical patterns and there is very little that can be done to avoid it. Aaron Clauset is another scientist who has been working on the same subject and, in a sobering analysis of his, he calculates the probablities of future wars. According to his calculations, a war as large as the Second World War has more than 40% chances to occur within 100 years from now. Then, a war causing more than billion battle deaths, that is exterminating most of humankind, has a probability of 5% to occur in less than 4 centuries from now. That doesn't mean we can relax for 4 centuries, not at all. It means we can expect it at any moment in the future.

From Aaron Clauset, 2018. (highlighting by UB)

.... a stationary model may be used to estimate the likelihood of a very large war occurring over 100 years, one like the Second World War, which produced x_* = 16,634,907 battle deaths. Using the ensemble of semiparametric models for the sizes of wars and assuming a new war onset every 1.91 years on average (43), the probability of observing at least one war with x_* or more deaths is p_* = 0.43 ± 0.01 (Monte Carlo), and the expected number of these events over the next 100 years is 0.62 ± 0.01. Hence, under stationarity, the likelihood of a very large war over the next 100 years is not particularly small.

Under an even stronger assumption of stationarity, the model can estimate the waiting time for a war of truly spectacular size, such as one with x = 1,000,000,000 (one billion) battle deaths. A conflict this large would be globally catastrophic and would likely mark the end of modern civilization. It is also not outside the realm of possibility, if current nuclear weapons were used widely.

Using the ensemble of semiparametric models of war sizes and a longer Monte Carlo simulation, the model estimates that the median forecasted waiting time for such an event is 1339 years. Reflecting the large fluctuations that are natural under the empirical war size distribution, the distribution of waiting times for such a catastrophic event is enormously variable, with the 5 to 95% quantiles ranging from 383 to 11,489 years. A median delay of roughly 1300 years does not seem like a long time to wait for an event this enormous in magnitude, and humans have been waging war on each other, in one way or another, for substantially longer than that.

2019: Are you Ready for a New World War? A Statistical Analysis

Detail from Picasso's "Guernica" - 1937

With the end of 2018, also the centennial of the end of the Great War (or WWI) is over. It passed remarkably in silence: a few celebrations, but little or no discussion of the reasons and the consequences of that war, supposed to be the one that would "end all wars." Of course, it was too much to expect that wars would ever end, but maybe we could have at least learned something from rethinking to a conflict that caused some 40 million victims for no evident purpose. But that didn't happen (if you can read Italian, you may be interested in a reflection of mine on the subject).

So, the world situation, today, looks more and more similar to the military build-up that took place in Europe in the years preceding the Great War. The Great Powers are arranging their forces as if they were setting their pieces on a giant chessboard. At some moment, someone may well decide to make the first move. And, in this giant chess game, the kings can wipe out all the pieces on the chessboard in a single move with their nuclear warheads.

It would be nice to follow Steven Pinker's optimism about modern times, supposed to have become less violent. There may be such a trend for the past few decades, but it is always dangerous to extrapolate from a limited dataset. In this case, the optimism of Pinker seems to be simply wrong if measured over a time span of several centuries. This is the result of an analysis of the data for the conflicts of the past 600 years that myself and my coworkers Martelloni and Di Patti performed in 2018 -- it was thought, in part, as a way to celebrate the centennial of the Great War.

Our results are mostly a confirmation of a series of analyses that was started by Lewis Fry Richardson, pacifist and polymath, who was the first to study wars trying to understand their statistical patterns. It is a field that today has grown and arrived at a number of conclusions, mainly that war is a statistical phenomenon largely independent from religions, ideologies, money, and great leaders. It is an "emergent phenomenon" of the complex network of interactions among human societies worldwide. There is some evidence that wars are becoming less frequent, but they are also becoming more deadly. There follows there is a chance of a major conflict in a non-remote future that could dwarf all past conflicts in terms of the destruction it could cause. On this point, see a recent paper by Aaron Clauset.

Unfortunately, the results of these studies are practically unknown beyond the small group of practitioners engaged in it and with every new war we repeat the mistakes of the Great War, thinking that a war could be a way to end wars -- it is something that was repeated as recently as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As usual, we are marching blindfolded into the future and the future may not be kind to those who don't understand it.

I have already reported some preliminary results of this study (also here, here, and here). Now you can read our complete paper on ArXiv, and here are some excerpts.

_______________________________________________________________

Pattern Analysis of World Conflicts over the past 600 years

Gianluca Martelloni, Francesca Di Patti, Ugo Bardi

(excerpts from the complete paper)

We analyze the largest database available for violent conflicts, the one prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011), covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a power law over the whole data series for the period considered, with no evidence of periodicity. We also observe that the number of conflicts, again normalized for the human population, show a decreasing trend as a function of time. Our results tend to support the idea that war is a statistical phenomenon related to the network structure of the human society.

Our contribution in this field consists in validating the Brecke conflict database (Brecke 2011)⁠, among the longest and most complete ones available. This analysis confirms previous work, see e.g. (Clauset 2018)⁠ , (Clauset and Gleditsch 2018)⁠ for a general discussion. The data indicate that power laws are common in the distribution of violent conflicts in human history – in this case, the trend is clear when the number of casualties is normalized for the increasing world population. Note also that the normalized number of conflicts per year tend to decrease with time – this result indicates that in modern times war have tended to become less frequent, but more destructive. In practice, these results confirm that there is little evidence supporting the idea popularized by Pinker (Pinker 2011)⁠ that humankind is progressing toward a more peaceful world. A new major conflict might be possible in a non-remote future, as discussed among others by Clauset (Clauset 2018)⁠. These results seem to indicate that human conflicts are a critical phenomenon: we could say that humans worldwide tend to form societies existing in a self-organized critical condition, as defined by Bak et al. (Per Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld 1988)⁠. In these conditions, war is simply one of the methods that the system has to dissipate entropy at the fastest possible speed (Kleidon, Malhi, and Cox 2010)⁠,(Trinn 2018)⁠. In other words, war appears to be an unavoidable consequence of the behavior of human beings, and perhaps of other primate species (de Waal 2000)⁠.

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Should we Prepare for a New World War? Answers from the Patterns of Past

 I know that I have crammed together too many ideas here: Tolstoy, St. Francis, critical phenomena, thermodynamics, and more,  - it is contrary to the rules of blog posts. But the centennial of the end of the Great War gave me the occasion to write something about how, in 1914, the European states sleepwalked into the Great War just like we may be doing nowadays. If the Great War couldn't end all wars as it was said to be able to do, the greater one that may be coming could actually do that, but in a very different way. The new war could lead to the extinction of humankind. So, what hope do we have? I don't know, but the first step to solving a problem is to understand it. So far, humans haven't learned anything much from the mistakes of the past but, who knows? Maybe one day they will.

The centennial of the end of the Great War is a good occasion to rethink a little about wars: why, how, and when wars occur and if there is any hope to stop blindly walking along a path taking us to the possibility of the complete annihilation of humankind. It is a question that has been posed many times and never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps the first to try to answer it was Leon Tolstoy in his “War and Peace” novel, (1867), where he wondered how it could be possible that a single man named Napoleon could cause millions of men to move all together eastward with the purpose of killing other men whom they had never met and they had no reason to hate.

Tolstoy was not a scientist, he operated on the basis of experience and intuition. But, just like Darwin understood the laws of genetics by experience and intuition, Tolstoy understood the laws of social networks. In War and Peace, he wrote:

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.”

And,

“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen”

Tolstoy had grasped the concept that war is not the result of mad dictators giving orders to their followers. It is not even a rational struggle for resources or for money, although that factor plays a role. It is just something that happens beyond the human capability of controlling it, or even of understanding it.

One century after Tolstoy, statistics had advanced to the point that a quantitative analysis of the war phenomenon became possible. The British meteorologist and physicists Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) applied the concept to the frequency and the size of human wars and more in general to what he called “deadly quarrels.” Richardson found that wars are random phenomena, unpredictable and unrelated to almost anything else: they just happen.

More recent work confirmed the early analysis by Richardson, finding that wars follow "power laws." Some recent work we did with my coworkers Martelloni and Di Patti confirms this result over a time scale of some 600 years and worldwide (preliminary results, to be published soon). It is a subject that I already discussed in an earlier post.

Power laws are typical "emergent phenomena" that take place in complex systems. They are the result of the dissipation of accumulated energy that occurs not gradually but in bumps. The quintessential system that behaves in this way is the "sandpile" that Per Bak used as a representation of the condition that he called "self-organized criticality." Fascinating in a mathematical model, these bumps can be deadly in the real world. Earthquakes, landslides, avalanches and more phenomena involving natural disasters tend to occur following power laws.

These results confirm Tolstoy's intuition: wars are not the result of ideologies, religions, mad rulers, or the like. They emerge out of a social network as a result of the way the system is connected. That doesn't mean there are no causes for wars: they are the result of accumulated capital that needs to be dissipated in some way. Wherever there is an unbalance in the accumulation of capital, the excess will spill from the more endowed side to the less endowed one. In a sense, war is the offspring of capitalism, but capitalism is just another emergent phenomenon of complex societies. In short, wars are not caused by a lack of resources, they are caused by an excess of resources.

When a new world war will start can't be exactly predicted -- it is like for earthquakes. Nobody can say exactly where and when a major earthquake will take place, but we know that there is a certain probability for it to occur in seismic zones and, sooner or later, it will. The same seems to be valid for wars. So, the fact that the start of wars can't be exactly predicted doesn't mean we can't see that today we are running at full speed toward a new one. If the trend of the past 600 years continues to hold, there is a larger than zero probability that we'll see a new conflagration that could surpass of an order of magnitude -- or perhaps more than that -- the second world war in terms of destruction and number of victims.

Could we do something to avoid that outcome? We have to look at the basics: if wars are like earthquakes, they are a thermodynamic phenomenon that dissipates accumulated energy. In the case of earthquakes, there is nothing we can do to avoid the movement the Earth's tectonic plates and the accumulation of energy at the faults that separate them. In the case of wars, the accumulated energy to be dissipated is in the form of capital, in a general sense of money, riches, population, resources, etc. Can we avoid the accumulation of capital? Not so easy in a society that sees the accumulation of riches as a good thing to be encouraged in individuals as well as in entire societies.

So, is it our destiny to see the end of humankind in a series of clouds of radioactive smoke? Perhaps. But I would also like to add something more: the cycle of energy dissipation in the form of war is something that we can approximately measure only for a period of existence of humankind of a few centuries in the past. And this was a period of economic expansion, eventually propped up by the availability of fossil fuels. Once we cross over the peak of this great historical cycle, many things could change and capital might be more difficult to accumulate. That would change many things, perhaps also the probabilities of major wars to occur.

Of course, you don't need a lot of capital accumulating in order to have a war -- we know that tribal societies are far from being peaceful. But tribal wars, at least, don't take with them the whole Earth's ecosystem. It is, after all, something that St. Francis had already discovered long ago at the individual level: material poverty can make you a better person if you willingly accept it. It took a thousand years before someone (Aurelio Peccei among the first) that inequality among nations is the mother of all wars. Could the human society embrace "Lady Poverty" as Francis did? Would that avoid wars or, at least, the kind of apocalyptical wars that could be waged today? We cannot say, but perhaps a dim glimmer of hope remains even in this dark period.

The West and Russia: a tit for tat game. Part 3

 By Tatiana Yugay 

The the third post of a series on the crisis in Ukraine by Tatiana Yugay, Professor at the Moscow State University of Economics.

“Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death”

Otto von Bismarck

While the U.S. and the EU entertain themselves introducing more and more sanctions against Russia, their target doesn't participate in this petty game. If I were the Western leaders, I would be worried, why Putin does not respond to their attacks? From the recent events, they might know that Putin's silence is a frightening sign. Yes, they are rather nervous that the Russian bear would come to Ukraine and bite off its eastern and southern provinces. At the same time, some of them have been actively provoking Russia, possibly in order to step into a military conflict. Though the atmosphere is very tense there, I strongly believe that Russia won't provide military aid to the east-Ukranian federalists. All this anxiety about Russian possible invasion of Ukraine are caused by the incapability of the West to think strategically and foresee Putin's geopolitical moves, even though they are very obvious.

Russia's U-turn to a multipolar world

Being a Eurasian superpower, Russia, as a two-faced Janus, has been looking to the West and to the East throughout its history. During two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Janus was looking with hope to the West. Janus's turn to the East has been developing gradually as Russia has gradually realized that the West would never regard the country as an equal partner, but will rather continue treating it as a mere source of raw materials. The recent US hysteria about Putin's letter to the EU leadership has made it particularly clear. Putin has warned the EU about possible difficulties of gas transit from Russia due to Ukraine's $2.2 billion debt to Gazprom. 

Furthermore, the West has become less attractive for Russia from an economic point of view, since it has been weakened by the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the emerging markets have been demonstrating dynamic economic growth. Thus, the imprudent Western sanction policy has served as a strong catalyst for Russia's geopolitical shift to the East. In my opinion, we are observing not only a temporary turn, but a long-term U-turn of Russia toward the East. 

 

On March 18, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov voiced the Russian position, "If an economic partner on the one side of the globe imposes sanctions, we will pay attention to new partners from the globe’s other side. The world is not monopolar, we will concentrate on other economic partners".

In fact, Russia's new partners aren't that new. Russia has been gradually strengthening economic and political ties with two mighty non-Western clubs - the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and BRICS. According to Alexei Likhachev, Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development, “the ASEAN countries are attractive for Russia because their markets are "complementary" to the Russian economy unlike the European ones. Though the trade volume with Europe is significant, European exports don't contribute to the creation of high-tech jobs in Russia. Concentrating on Asia is warranted because exports in this region include high tech machinery and military equipment not only hydrocarbons. Also, Asian markets, unlike the markets in Europe, have a tremendous growth potential and significant synergies with Russian economy”. 

 

AFP Photo / Sergei Karpukhin

During the past 13 years, Russia has been developing close relations within BRICS organization, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Currently, BRICS represents 42 percent of the world’s population and about a quarter of the world’s economy, which means that this bloc of states is an important global actor. Today, in total, there are more than 20 formats of cooperation within the BRICS. In February, the member-states came to an agreement about 11 possible projects of scientific and technical cooperation, from aeronautics to bio- and nanotechnology. Last year, Russia's trade turnover with BRICS has reached $105 billion. One of the most potent Russia's partners, which holds a membership in both clubs (ASEAN and BRICS), is China.

During the Direct Line on April 17, Vladimir Putin, responding to a question about the Russian-Chinese relations, admitted that ”they are progressing very successfully in terms of trust and collaboration, which are unprecedented. This includes political cooperation and our shared views on international affairs and global security, which is the basis for these intergovernmental relations... We have never had such trust-based relations in the military industry. We began holding joint drills at sea and on land, in both China and the Russian Federation. This gives us reason to assume that Russian-Chinese relations will be a significant factor in global policy and will substantially influence modern international relations”.

In 2013, the trade volume between Russia and China has reached $89 billion. Leaders of two states called for annual bilateral trade between the two countries to be boosted to $100 billion by 2015. Meantime, China has already overtook Germany as Russia's biggest buyer of crude oil this year, thanks to Rosneft securing deals to boost eastward oil supplies via the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and another one through Kazakhstan. Last year, relations between Russia and China have been actively developing in different fields. In particular, in 2013 the states signed 21 trade agreements, including a new 100 million ton oil supply deal with China’s Sinopec. On October 2013, the two governments signed an agreement to build, jointly an oil refinery in Tianjin, east of Beijing. In addition, China is ready to invest $20 billion in domestic projects in Russia, focusing on transport infrastructure, highways, ports, and airports, and it hoped to increase investment in Russia fourfold by 2020.

However, a millennium deal between the two giants is still to be concluded, though, it is already nicknamed as "Holy Grail" by the media. The Russian Gazprom and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNOOC) are ready to strike a thirty-year gas deal on supplies of 68 billion cubic meters per year by two routes. Fast growing China desperately needs Russian gas. According to expert assessments, China's demand for gas will reach 300-350 billion cubic meters per year by 2020. China's own production can provide about 115 billion cubic meters. Experts predict that by 2030 total gas consumption in China will exceed the European one, which now makes about 600 billion cubic meters. Russia and China have been negotiating on gas deal since 2004. A stumbling block in the negotiations has been a basic price. Recently a high-level Russian delegation visited China. Following the talks, Chairman of OAO "Gazprom" Alexey Miller stated, "During this round of negotiations, we agreed on all technical issues of the project. Progress has been made in the negotiations on the price of gas. The parties agreed that the contract will enter into force before the end of 2014”. It is expected that the long-awaited contract will be signed during Putin's May visit to China (in Russia, we keep fingers crossed!).

Currently, Russian gas is not supplied to China, though in 2013 Russia’s biggest independent natural gas producer, Novatek, signed preliminary memorandums with CNPC to sell at least 3 million tons of LNG per year between Yamal LNG and PetroChina International. Another Russian company, Rosneft, which is 75 percent state-owned, is vastly expanding its LNG projects to diversify its portfolio, and is focusing heavily on eastern markets, like Japan and China.

Besides the energy sector, the two countries look forward for further partnerships in the defense sphere. It is expected that Moscow and Beijing will sign a $3.5 billion contract on the sale of 100 Su-35 fighters to China ahead of Putin's visit to Beijing in May. In 2014, Russia and China have got a full agenda for bilateral cooperation, which includes not only trade but also such spheres as energy, aircraft building, mechanical engineering, military and science cooperation, tourism, etc. 

The second largest Russia's trading partner within BRICS is India. In 2012, the volume of bilateral trade reached $11 billion, which is rather modest in comparison with China. In 2013 this index slightly decreased. It is expected that in the near future India would sign the Economic Cooperation Agreement with the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In case of joining India to the free trade zone, its trade with the members of the Customs Union and, particularly, with Russia will boost. Traditionally, Russia and India have been closely cooperating in the defense sphere. At that, almost every defense contract provides for creation of joint ventures or licensed production. In 2013, India’s import of Russian weapons reached $4.78 billion. Another industry which attracts India is computer-guided weapons, produced by the Russian Morinformsystem-Agat Concern.

In February, the two states confirmed their plans to boost cooperation in nuclear energy, with the former backing the construction of more units at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) and other parts of the country. Besides, India and Russia are set to sign an agreement aimed at productive cooperation in many spheres: space and military cooperation, trade, construction of a pipeline from Russia to India, and plans to set up a Joint Study Group to look into the scope of the CECA (Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement) with member-countries of the Customs Union (the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus).

Brazil is a much smaller trading partner for Russia. The total trade volume between Russia and Brazil made $5.7 billion in 2013, however, the two states seek to increase it up to $10 billion in the near future. Russia imports Brazilian meat, coffee, sugar, juices and alcohol; and exports mainly fertilizers. However, in December 2012 the states signed a treaty on supplies of Russian helicopters to Brazil.

Farewell to the dollar

 

Boosting trade relations with non-western partners would inevitably raise a problem of currency for mutual settlements. Up to date, Russia has been using US dollar in its oil and gas trade by default. However, in a situation where the western partners have become less reliable and, moreover, are threatening with trade and financial sanction the instinct of economic self-preservation demands to use more secure means of payment. Since Russia sells its own raw materials, it can change the rules. In 2013, Russian exports of crude oil and oil products accounted for $283 billion, natural gas exports made $67 billion and LNG - $5.5 billion. Taking into account the future gas deal with China and other hydrocarbon projects, Russia can count on a big chunk of the pie on the global fuel and energy market which can be nominated in any type of liquid assets. Besides, Russia is close to entering a goods-for-oil swap transaction with Iran that will give Rosneft around 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil per day to sell in the global market.

 

Instead of feeding the U.S. with petrodollars, Russia can switch to petrorubles, regional currencies and even gold. In addition to the oil and gas trade, Rosoboronexport, state company specialized in weapon exports, can start trading in rubles. Prominent US trader Jim Sinclair believes that Russia can easily cause the collapse of the US economy. The economist, famous for his forecasts, explains that the strength of the dollar is based on the US agreement with Saudi Arabia that all contracts for fuel deliveries be in the US dollars. Now, Moscow can cancel the petrodollar and bring down a colossus with feet of clay.

As Tyler Durden justly admits, "If it was the intent of the West to bring Russia and China together - one a natural resource (if "somewhat" corrupt) superpower and the other a fixed capital/labor output (if "somewhat" capital misallocating and credit bubbleicious) powerhouse - in the process marginalizing the dollar and encouraging Ruble and Renminbi bilateral trade, then things are surely "going according to plan."

Moreover, BRICS countries have been repeatedly expressing their determination to abandon the dollar in their mutual trade. And it is not a threat which the U.S. can easily ignore. In 2012, the mutual trade between BRICS member states was about $280 billion. Besides, BRICS has an ambitious task to raise the trade volume up to $500 billion in 2015. One more bad news for the buck is in the air. It is expected that in the nearest future China will declare the yuan as a gold-backed world reserve currency. These expectations are heated by China's recent activity in accumulating monetary gold and its huge official international reserves, which reached $3,7 trillion at the end of 2013. China’s central bank may have stocked up heavily on gold in the past few years, and might own about 2,710 tons as of the end of 2013, according to an industry expert. According to Jim Rickards, next April China will shock the world announcing that it has accumulated 5,000 tonnes of gold. 

 

Besides shifting away from the dollar, emerging markets have been making further arrangements for redesigning the global finance. In order to modernize the global economic system, which now is US&EU-centric, member states have created the BRICS Stock Alliance and are working on launching their own development bank to finance large infrastructure projects. One more direct consequence of ill-considered US sanctions is Russia's strong decision to create its own payment processing system. As a result of financial sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russian financial institutions over Crimea, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing transactions for several Russian banks. Currently, Visa and MasterCard control about 85 percent of all card transactions in Russia. At that, 90 percent of transactions are carried out within Russia's territory. Recently, Russia’s biggest financial institute Sberbank said the PRO 100 payment system, that’s been in development for a couple of years, will be launched on a massive scale within months. Russian banking community presume that Russia can develop its own digital card payment system in cooperation with China, particularly, on the basis of the UnionPay processing system. When the national payment processing system will be created Visa and MasterCard would lose a big piece of Russia's market.

What really the West is to gain at the end of the play? 

 

Now it's pretty clear, why Russia doesn't participate in ridiculous sanctions game notwithstanding US never-ending threats. Putin and his partners are busy reconfiguring the global political and economic landscape. The biggest loser will be the U.S. since its brand new American dream or long-declared pivot to Asia would be hardly realized. Partly, because the U.S. has too much bogged down in  Ukraine and, mainly, because Russia but not the U.S. has been pivoting to Asia just now. Obama can enjoy himself building houses of cards from tons of dollars which the FRS has been printing diligently. The EU can lose its loyal and reliable partner and get instead struggling fragments of the Ukraine.

Conclusion

It is clear that the Russian economy would suffer a serious damage if the EU were to introduce a full-scale economic sanctions' regime. However, far-reaching consequences of the above-mentioned geopolitical shifts would more than compensate for this temporary damage. Russian leaders and ordinary people are fully aware of future difficulties and are ready to pay the price for regaining Crimea. When I returned from Italy to Moscow at the end of March, I spoke with a taxi driver who met me at the airport. He was very enthusiastic about the Crimea story and told me that he and his family weren't afraid of any future sanctions. “The main thing is that the Crimea is again ours. We, Russians, are accustomed to difficulties. But we don't want war”. In fact, I've never seen such a unanimity of opinions during all post-communist period. It seems that the Russian people have finally restored its self-esteem and identity. For the first time since the collapse of the USSR, we are proud of our country. I believe that further sanctions would only reinforce these feelings. Following the successful Olympic and Paralympic Games and the peaceful reintegration of Crimea with Russia, Putin's rating has skyrocketed. According to the VCIOM All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center, since the beginning of 2014, Vladimir Putin’s rating has risen 15 percent and stands at 75.7 percent – the highest in the last five years. While enjoying the powerful support of his citizens, Putin can proceed with geopolitical redesigning together with the ASEAN and BRICS partners.

The West and Russia: a tit for tat game. Part 1.

TheWest and Russia: a tit for tat game. Part2.