This is succession planning. It's about laying down memories in Australia against the time the Queen dies. The first tour is the one that matters – the tour with the young couple and the baby, the gloss not worn off their marriage and possible princely misdemeanours of the child far in the future.

When, fifteen years ago, Vladimir Putin was appointed Prime Minister under the ailing Boris Yeltsin, few would have thought that he was to become one of Russia’s longest-serving political leaders in living memory.

George Kennan knew a thing or two about how nations treat one another. In 1946, while serving as deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Moscow, he penned “the long telegram.” That assessment of what motivated the Soviet Union shaped U.S. policy toward Moscow for decades.

Last week I joined several hundred other scholars at the 2014 International Studies Association convention. As expected, opinions on events in Ukraine abound. I was struck by the multiplicity of versions of the same events. More interesting still was how readily scholars were to label different versions as “propaganda.”

Latvia is joining Lithuania in banning Russian state television broadcasts because it found that several programs about the Ukraine crisis were tendentious and not in the Baltic nation’s security interests.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the McCain Institute present a discussion on Russian Propaganda and Russian minorities in Eastern Europe.

The revelation that a US government-funded program set up a cellphone-based social network in Cuba is likely to pose new challenges for independent bloggers and exile groups that work to increase access to technology.