Quotes About Russia

Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.

Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited within the European Union and the United States.

In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.

For many Europeans and Americans, events in the 2010s—the rise of antidemocratic politics, the Russian turn against Europe and invasion of Ukraine, the Brexit referendum, the Trump election—came as a surprise.

Russia contains one fourth of the inhabitants of all Europe, and one half of the entire number of Israelites.

It is different in Russia. Here there is a television channel devoted to opera and dance.

If the Russians masterminded fraud for 40 years at the highest state level in sports, operating behind the scenes to corrupt sports, what else are they capable of?

In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.

In the autumn of 2018, though it was hardly noted at the time, something historic occurred: The United States overtook both Russia and Saudi Arabia to regain its rank as the world's largest oil producer, a position it had lost more than four decades earlier.

Russia became the largest exporter of wheat in the world—quite a turnaround from the 1970s, when the Soviet Union spent a good part of its oil earnings buying wheat from the United States. Moreover, in retaliation for the sanctions, the Russian

earnings from oil and gas exports provide the financial foundation for the Russian state and Russian power—in normal times, 40 to 50 percent of the government's budget, 55 to 60 percent of export earnings, and an estimated 30 percent of GDP.

domestic production. Yet the concern about Russia's potential leverage from gas exports does not fully recognize how much both the European and world gas markets have changed. The gas market in Europe has become a real market of buyers and sellers, rather than a system based on inflexible long-term contracts.

By 1898, Russia overtook the United States to become the world's biggest petroleum producer.

By the end of 2018, Russian output reached 11.4 million barrels per day, as high as at the peak for Russia in Soviet days.

announcement of the big deal—valued at $400 billion over thirty years. The contract would make China the second-largest market for Russian gas, after Germany. The Chinese would also provide the financing for a massive new $45 billion, thirteen-hundred-mile "Power of Siberia" gas pipeline. "This will be the biggest construction project in the world for the next four years, without exaggeration," Putin said after the signing.

Xi Jinping's first stop on his first foreign trip as president in 2013 was Moscow. China became Russia's largest trading partner. The respective roles were very clear. China provided manufactures, consumer goods, and finance; Russia, oil, gas, coal, and other commodities—and geopolitical alignment.

the $25 billion, 2,800-mile ESPO (Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean) oil pipeline. In 2005, just 5 percent of Russia's oil exports went to China. It rose to almost 30 percent, and Russia eclipsed Saudi Arabia as China's number one supplier.

Whenever I have friends over, we end up eating and talking and losing track of time, and, once in a while, singing karaoke. It reminds me of the family meals we had in Russia, which always lasted a very long time. That's a tradition I miss.

Thus in Prussia the Hohenzollern King was the head of the Church. In no country with the exception of Czarist Russia did the clergy become by tradition so completely servile to the political authority of the State.

The German generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt's grim account of the French conqueror's disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.

The great issues of peace and war will never be decided by majority vote, or any vote. We Americans have got to get that through our heads. That, and the fact that Russia, Great Britain and the United States, after due discussion, will largely determine the kind of world organization we are going to have.

As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.