Academic Chair Prof. Mark Galeotti’s latest edited book, The Politics of Security in Modern Russia, has just been published by Ashgate. Edward Lucas of the Economist calls it “Incisive, well-informed and disturbing” and it is distinctive in its coverage of Russian security issues taken broadly and in the light of the 2008 Georgian war and the economic crisis. The international collection of contributors — Mark Galeotti, Graeme Herd, Mark Smith, Bettina Renz, Pavel Baev, C.W. Blandy, Stephen J. Cimbala, Julian Cooper, Stephen Blank and Dmitri Trenin — explore how the Putin era saw a striking ’securitization’ of politics, something that he bequeathed to his chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev. The book explores how the omens from the early days of the Medvedev presidency have been mixed, marked both by less confrontational rhetoric towards the West and by war with Georgia and continued re-armament. Has the Medvedev generation learned the lessons not just from the Soviet era but also from the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies, or will security remain the foundation of Russian foreign and domestic policy?

A ship carrying 650 tons of uranium waste arrived in Russia's second largest city, St. Petersburg, Greenpeace said on Monday.

The dangerous cargo of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which belongs to the French nuclear energy group Areva, was then loaded onto railway cars to be transported to the Siberian Chemical Combine in the Tomsk region, the statement added.

The Russian vessel, the Kapitan Kuroptev arrived in St. Petersburg in the early hours of Monday. The ship had already been a source of controversy after a group of nature activists tried to stop it from entering the port in 2005 when it was carrying a similar cargo of spent nuclear fuel.

According to international standards, however, uranium hexafluoride is not considered nuclear waste, and can be transformed into fuel to release energy for nuclear power stations.

France's Areva and Britain's Urenco, a European consortium which supplies equipment to enrich uranium for the nuclear industry, has shipped some 140,000 tons of nuclear waste over the last 15 years to Russia.

Ship carrying nuclear waste arrives in St. Petersburg

That's really awful for Russia!