PARIS — Minutes after it began broadcasting on Monday night, the new television channel RT France took aim at the country and its president, Emmanuel Macron. “President Assad accuses France of supporting terrorism,” the scroll at the bottom of the screen stated. France and the United States are part of a coalition committed to removing Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and Mr. Assad has accused France of merely prolonging Syria’s civil war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since 2011.

China, Russia and the U.S. see potential and risks. And for now, there's still no form of governance to oversee AI development — technology moves faster than diplomacy.

With just a few weeks left until French voters head to the polls, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen made her way to Moscow for a surprise meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

Russia watchers say Moscow is deploying considerable resources to swing the French election.

Russia's Pivot to Asia. Assessment and Strategic Implications.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, analyses the factors driving Russia’s push to expand its influence in Asia. Interview recorded at the French institute of international relations on 15 April 2016.

"Past year has been marked not only with the Ukrainian crisis and unprecedented tensions in political relations between Russia and the West, but also with somewhat radical change of Moscow’s approach to international energy affairs. Widely promoted new energy partnerships with countries like China and Turkey were supposed to demonstrate that Russia has a choice of alternatives for mass-scale international energy cooperation, as compared to previous domination of European dimension, and if West wishes to cut ties with the Kremlin, Russia has somewhere else to go.

Does Russia really have an option of developing new international energy partnerships comparable in scale and significance to those with Europe as the consumer of energy, and with Western IOCs as key agents helping to secure further exploration and development of Russian oil & gas resources?"

Disputed rocks and Beijing’s bad behavior in the South China Sea dominate the headlines these days. But there’s another showdown over disputed islands in the Pacific that is increasingly casting a shadow over Asia-Pacific security: a bitter fight between Japan and Russia over the Kurils...

The speakers from the Annual Conference on the United States summarize their talks in short videos. Here, Jeff Mankoff analyzes the strategies put in place by the United States with hopes of containing the situation in Ukraine.

Rebel commander Alexander Zakharchenko smiled only slightly on hearing that he had won this weekend's elections in Donetsk, Ukraine (pictured). The results were never in doubt: Mr Zakharchenko's nominal opponents openly supported him, and his face was the only one on campaign billboards. Nonetheless, eastern Ukraine's separatist republics went through the motions of democracy, including inviting international election observers. Those proved hard to find: while Russia has said it will respect the vote, America, the European Union, and the United Nations have all condemned it.

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