The mood at Friday's Valdai Club meeting was gloomy, which was inevitable since it took place against a background of stagnation in Russia and the United States and crisis in Europe. In Russia, both state and society appear to lack the capacity for internal regeneration. If this is so, then Russia can still continue fairly successfully along its present path as long as energy prices remain high, but it will not build up the kind of new economy that will be able to replace energy as a source of wealth in the long term.

It may seem incredible to say this, given past experience, but a few years from now, Europe and the world could be looking back at the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush with nostalgia.

U.S. President George W. Bush's administration's ideological rhetoric concerning U.S. policy in the Middle East has become separated from the policy itself to an extent almost reminiscent of the former Soviet Union.

The failure of the Orange Revolution has saved Ukraine, Europe and the United States from a great danger.

If you are a European, there may be many things you can do or say about Russia, but one thing you cannot do is ignore it.

Historians of the future will look back with amazement at U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the millennium, especially with regard to Russia.

The Western debate over Russia's assault on Chechnya has been largely polarized, with Russophobes crying genocide and Islamophobes warning about Moslem terrorists. But the attitudes of Chechen refugees whose lives have been upended by the war are far more nuanced, and may yield some insight into achieving a lasting peace. There are two main story lines to the Chechen tragedy of the 1990s. The obvious one has been the ruthlessness with which the Russians have twice intervened militarily. An overlooked factor has been the collapse in Chechnya of the institutions of modern statehood - law enforcement, schools, hospitals, courts - since the national revolution of 1991. This situation was made much worse by war, but it also owes a great deal to the Chechens' historical resistance to any superior authority and their traditional tolerance for what we would now regard as banditry.