In the latest sign of heightened cultural diplomacy between France and Russia, Manet’s Olympia (1863) will travel from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for an exhibition at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow that opens to the public on 19 April.

An affiliate of the largest and most powerful Kurdish party in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), opened its first official mission abroad — in Moscow. Given the amount of military and political support the PYD has received from the United States, this decision is likely to be received with some shock and confusion in the West. But a closer examination of the PYD’s historical experience and core interests suggests that the politics behind a potential realignment with Moscow makes strategic sense.

Stories about the increasing synergy in Sino-Russian relations have proliferated over the last few months with Western, Russian, and Chinese analysts unable to agree on the genuine contours of the relationship. However, there exists a consensus that the partnership between Moscow and Beijing has reached a mature phase with broad economic, political, cultural, and security dimensions and stable, institutionalized mechanisms binding the two powers together. 

A Russian initiative to host peace talks this month between the Syrian government and its opponents appears to be unraveling as prominent Syrian opposition figures shun the prospective negotiations amid deep distrust of Moscow and concerns the talks hold no chance of success.

Russia has condemned legislation passed by the United States Congress authorizing $350 million in military aid to Ukraine's government, which has been fighting pro-Russian separatists in the east.

The fact that families run from a war zone is heartbreaking but hardly unexpected. (...) Most of those who fled were Russian speakers from the east, but this still raises a sobering question: If this is a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, why did so many Ukrainians choose to cast their lot with the enemy?
 

There were 76, but they were dubbed the "Russian 100" — life-savers flown in from Moscow within hours of an appeal for help from Serbia as the heaviest rainfall in more than a century inundated the Balkans in May.