Russia-watchers and Russians have spent much of the year debating what's behind Putin's adventurism in Ukraine, his meddling in eastern Europe's Baltic states, his support for anti-American dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad and North Korea's Kim Jong Un, and the headaches he is generally causing Western leaders.

One of the most admirable aspects of Obama-era foreign policy has been the decision to use American soft power to actively promote LGBTQ rights, including in Europe.

Just months after President Vladimir Putin erased $32 billion in Cuban debt, Russia's ties with the Caribbean island are coming under increasing strain as the ruble collapses and President Barack Obama re-establishes diplomatic ties and eases a five-decade embargo.

Although the Sochi Games were by many measures a success, any global afterglow quickly dimmed a few weeks later when Russia annexed more Black Sea property: the Crimea in neighboring Ukraine.

The BBC World Service is being financially outgunned by Russian and Chinese state-owned news channels, its former director Peter Horrocks has warned, amid high-level concerns that Britain and the US are losing a global “information war” with the Kremlin.

The plunging price of oil is a geopolitical game-changer.(...)For now, though, there are potential foreign policy benefits to the United States, presuming deft diplomacy and an effective Congress will take advantage of the situation.

The Cuba announcement is the latest example of “soft power,’’ much ridiculed in an age of terrorism, religious extremism and regional warfare. It’s a policy that taps nonmilitary advantages such as technology, financial power and open institutions to push American ideals. 

The idea of Russian “soft power” became fashionable, but it was very different to European “soft power”. So-called Russian soft power was just “softer power”, including any means of coercion not involving tanks. It was, in the English phrase, “softly-softly” power, or “covert power”, the type of behind-the-scenes influence encapsulated in the Russian phrase kuluarna polityka – politics in corridors, not just away from public influence, but without formal record.