The article examines the strategic role of the Arctic in ensuring global energy and transport security. The Arctic is of growing importance for the global economy and the energy sector, as it contains substantial oil and gas reserves and provides access to the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a shorter transport corridor between Europe and Asia. The route along Russia’s Arctic coast reduces the distance between European and Asian ports by 30–40% compared with the traditional route through the Suez Canal. Against the backdrop of geopolitical instability, the importance of such an alternative corridor is increasing.

The paper focuses on three key aspects: the competitive advantages of the Northern Sea Route over southern maritime routes; the scale of natural-resource reserves in the Arctic region; and the military and strategic significance of the Arctic in the current geopolitical environment.

The analysis shows that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in 2026, which clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of traditional trade routes, underscored the relevance of Russia’s longterm strategy for developing its Arctic vector. This strategy includes both the expansion of the resource base and production capacity, including through projects such as Vostok Oil, and the development of national infrastructure, including shipbuilding capacities such as the Zvezda Shipbuilding Complex. Taken together, these measures strengthen the resilience of export flows and reduce dependence on global trade chokepoints.

The findings are relevant for policy adjustments by states seeking to reduce the risks of trade isolation and disruption, which become particularly acute in periods of geopolitical instability.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are usually discussed as instruments of payment modernization, monetary sovereignty, or financial innovation. This article shifts the focus to their potential role as instruments of public policy. It examines the socially oriented use cases of China’s digital yuan (e-CNY) and asks how a retail CBDC can be incorporated into mechanisms of social support, regional development, crisis response, and stateled economic stabilization.

The article contributes to the literature on CBDCs by showing that the policy significance of digital currency depends not only on its technical design, but also on the institutional environment in which it is deployed. Drawing on regulatory documents, official materials of Chinese authorities and financial regulators, reports of international organizations, and academic studies on digital currencies and digital governance, the analysis combines a case-study approach with a comparative institutional perspective. The Chinese experience is compared with selected international practices, including voucher-based, inclusion-oriented, and crisis-response digital payment mechanisms.

The article argues that e-CNY is developing not merely as a new payment instrument, but as part of China’s broader digital governance infrastructure. Its use in targeted transfers, programmable fiscal incentives, consumer-stimulus schemes, financial inclusion initiatives, emergency payments, and regional support programmes demonstrates how digital currency can be connected to administrative registries, identification systems, and smart governance platforms. This integration may improve the targeting of public payments, reduce transaction and administrative costs, and limit risks associated with the misuse of budgetary resources.

The study concludes that the Chinese model represents a distinctive trajectory of CBDC development. Its defining feature is the close connection between digital currency design and 

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are usually discussed as instruments of payment modernization, monetary sovereignty, or financial innovation. This article shifts the focus to their potential role as instruments of public policy. It examines the socially oriented use cases of China’s digital yuan (e-CNY) and asks how a retail CBDC can be incorporated into mechanisms of social support, regional development, crisis response, and stateled economic stabilization.

The article contributes to the literature on CBDCs by showing that the policy significance of digital currency depends not only on its technical design, but also on the institutional environment in which it is deployed. Drawing on regulatory documents, official materials of Chinese authorities and financial regulators, reports of international organizations, and academic studies on digital currencies and digital governance, the analysis combines a case-study approach with a comparative institutional perspective. The Chinese experience is compared with selected international practices, including voucher-based, inclusion-oriented, and crisis-response digital payment mechanisms.

The article argues that e-CNY is developing not merely as a new payment instrument, but as part of China’s broader digital governance infrastructure. Its use in targeted transfers, programmable fiscal incentives, consumer-stimulus schemes, financial inclusion initiatives, emergency payments, and regional support programmes demonstrates how digital currency can be connected to administrative registries, identification systems, and smart governance platforms. This integration may improve the targeting of public payments, reduce transaction and administrative costs, and limit risks associated with the misuse of budgetary resources.

The study concludes that the Chinese model represents a distinctive trajectory of CBDC development. Its defining feature is the close connection between digital currency design and state administrative capacity. The case of e-CNY therefore shows that the effectiveness of CBDCs as public policy instruments depends less on technological launch as such than on their integration into broader systems of public administration, social policy, and economic governance.

This article reconstructs the formation and transformation of the image of Korean Emperor Gojong in Russia, from his lifetime to Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. While previous studies have addressed Gojong’s role in Russo-Korean relations mainly through unpublished diplomatic reports, this article is the first to examine how the Korean monarch was represented in Russian public opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The source base includes Russian periodicals, travel writings, military and diplomatic observations published at the time, as well as Soviet and Russian historiography. In total, the study draws on more than fifty pre-revolutionary sources and more than fifty Soviet and post-Soviet works. The article demonstrates that Gojong’s early contacts with Russia remained almost unknown to Russian society until his flight to the Russian legation in Seoul in 1896. After this event, the amount and diversity of information about Gojong, his court, and his political orientation steadily increased in the Russian press, especially on the eve of and during the Russo-Japanese War, the Hague Incident, and his forced abdication in 1907. The study shows that Russian public opinion was not uniform: part of the liberal press portrayed Gojong as a reactionary and ineffective ruler. Overall, however, Russian public discourse was dominated by sympathy for the tragic fate of the emperor and Korea, positive assessments of Gojong’s education and personal qualities, and recognition of his long-term orientation toward an alliance with Russia as a means of preserving Korean independence.

The article further establishes that Gojong’s post-1907 activities remained largely outside public discussion for a long time. His attempts to support a Korean anti-Japanese resistance base in the Russian Far East, his plans to move to Vladivostok, and his contacts with Russian military and civil administrators became fully visible only in modern historical research. The study also traces the changing place of Gojong in Soviet historiography. Because of his direct connection with the Korean independence movement and the March First Movement of 1919, Soviet historians could not ignore him; nevertheless, until the 1950s they tended to minimize the role of monarchists and the Yi dynasty in the Korean national liberation movement. From the 1960s onward, Russian historiography increasingly recognized Gojong’s active role in anti-Japanese resistance and in attempts to build a Russo-Korean political alliance. Although some historians continued to criticize his indecision and political weakness, the dominant trend in recent scholarship has been toward a more positive reassessment of Gojong as a symbol of Korean sovereignty and one of the key figures in the history of Russo-Korean relations.

This article reconstructs the formation and transformation of the image of Korean Emperor Gojong in Russia, from his lifetime to Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. While previous studies have addressed Gojong’s role in Russo-Korean relations mainly through unpublished diplomatic reports, this article is the first to examine how the Korean monarch was represented in Russian public opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The source base includes Russian periodicals, travel writings, military and diplomatic observations published at the time, as well as Soviet and Russian historiography. In total, the study draws on more than fifty pre-revolutionary sources and more than fifty Soviet and post-Soviet works. The article demonstrates that Gojong’s early contacts with Russia remained almost unknown to Russian society until his flight to the Russian legation in Seoul in 1896. After this event, the amount and diversity of information about Gojong, his court, and his political orientation steadily increased in the Russian press, especially on the eve of and during the Russo-Japanese War, the Hague Incident, and his forced abdication in 1907. The study shows that Russian public opinion was not uniform: part of the liberal press portrayed Gojong as a reactionary and ineffective ruler. Overall, however, Russian public discourse was dominated by sympathy for the tragic fate of the emperor and Korea, positive assessments of Gojong’s education and personal qualities, and recognition of his long-term orientation toward an alliance with Russia as a means of preserving Korean independence.

The article further establishes that Gojong’s post-1907 activities remained largely outside public discussion for a long time. His attempts to support a Korean anti-Japanese resistance base in the Russian Far East, his plans to move to Vladivostok, and his contacts with Russian military and civil administrators became fully visible only in modern historical research. The study also traces the changing place of Gojong in Soviet historiography. Because of his direct connection with the Korean independence movement and the March First Movement of 1919, Soviet historians could not ignore him; nevertheless, until the 1950s they tended to minimize the role of monarchists and the Yi dynasty in the Korean national liberation movement. From the 1960s onward, Russian historiography increasingly recognized Gojong’s active role in anti-Japanese resistance and in attempts to build a Russo-Korean political alliance. Although some historians continued to criticize his indecision and political weakness, the dominant trend in recent scholarship has been toward a more positive reassessment of Gojong as a symbol of Korean sovereignty and one of the key figures in the history of Russo-Korean relations.

This article examines forced migration from China to Russian Turkestan in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It reconstructs the chronology, scale, composition, and typology of these movements and assesses their significance for Russian-Chinese relations and the history of Central Asia. The study is based on documents from five archives in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, as well as published sources from the period under review. Methodologically, it combines historical analysis with the push-pull model of migration, while also taking into account legal and administrative mechanisms that shaped cross-border mobility.

The article shows that forced migration from China to Russian Turkestan was a large-scale and recurrent phenomenon rather than a series of isolated refugee movements. The first documented arrival of refugees from China in Russian Turkestan during the period under study occurred in 1864. In total, more than 100,000 people crossed into the Russian Empire as forced migrants. These movements included representatives of most ethnic and religious groups living in Xinjiang, among them Uyghurs, Dungans, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Oirats/Kalmyks, Sibe, Solons, Daurs, and Kashgarian groups. Refugees included men and women, adults and children, sedentary and nomadic populations, urban and rural residents, as well as both Chinese subjects and former subjects of the Russian Empire who had previously migrated to Chinese territory. The study demonstrates that the main waves of migration were directly connected with political upheavals in China, including the Muslim uprisings in Xinjiang, the Qing reconquest of the region, the transfer of the Ili region back to Chinese rule, and the Xinhai Revolution. The article distinguishes between spontaneous forced migration and state-managed forced resettlement, most clearly exemplified by the migration from the Ili region in 1881–1883. It also shows that the push factors were often mutually conditioned: groups loyal to the Qing authorities fled from insurgents, whereas participants in or supporters of anti-Qing movements later fled from Qing repression. By contrast, the pull factors were broadly similar across different refugee groups and included geographical proximity, the expectation of safety, the availability of refuge, ethnic and social ties with the population of Russian Turkestan, and the relative attractiveness of Russian rule in the borderlands.

The article concludes that the overwhelming majority of refugees from China remained within the Russian Empire. Return migration mainly affected those groups that had initially sought temporary refuge. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, readmission became an important coercive mechanism in the regulation of refugee flows. It was shaped both by Russia’s treaty obligations toward China and by changes in the Russian Empire’s own policy toward immigration and the settlement of its frontier regions. The study thus shows that forced migration from China to Russian Turkestan was not only a demographic and humanitarian process, but also an important factor in imperial governance, border management, and Russian-Chinese diplomacy.

This article examines the construction of the Soviet nuclear threat in Western political cartoons during the early Cold War, from the end of the Second World War to the first Soviet hydrogen bomb test (1945–1953). Although the mass culture of the atomic age has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the visual representation of atomic themes in political cartooning remains insufficiently studied, especially in Russian-language historiography. The article addresses this gap by showing how cartoons not only reflected, but also actively shaped nuclear discourse, politicized scientific achievement, and contributed to public perceptions of atomic energy, nuclear weapons, and international confrontation.

The study combines historical imagology, a constructivist approach, and content analysis. Its empirical basis consists of 418 Sunday issues of The New York Times, which regularly published political cartoons by artists from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The analysis identified 209 atomic-themed cartoons produced by 76 artists and drawn from 66 publications. On this basis, an iconographic codebook of recurrent visual motifs and meanings was compiled.

The results show that Western cartoonists increasingly framed the atomic question through the categories of “problem,” “threat,” and “confrontation with the USSR.” The most frequent motifs were “problem” (115 visual occurrences), “atomic bomb” (99), “threat” (87), “USSR” (77), “United States” (73), and “confrontation with the USSR” (59). The frequency and symbolic density of atomic cartoons peaked at key moments in the emerging nuclear arms race: 1945–1946, 1949, 1950, and 1953. The visual language of Western satirical graphics was dominated by a militarized and masculinized image of atomic power, above all the bomb. Early hopes for peaceful atomic progress were gradually displaced by representations of existential nuclear danger and by the logic of superpower rivalry.

A central finding of the article is that Western political cartoons transformed nuclear weapons from a universal post-war problem into a politically differentiated symbol. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, atomic and hydrogen bombs acquired a national identity: Western nuclear weapons were increasingly represented as defensive and order-preserving, whereas Soviet nuclear weapons were depicted as aggressive, illegitimate, and destabilizing. This dichotomy between “good” Western and “bad” Soviet nuclear power contributed to the visual construction of the USSR as the principal source of nuclear danger. By 1953, the dominant meaning of atomic cartoons had shifted toward nuclear confrontation between the superpowers and, more broadly, antagonism between the Western and Soviet systems. The article concludes that Western political cartoons helped consolidate durable stereotypes of the Soviet nuclear threat, many of which continued to shape the symbolic vocabulary of international relations beyond the early Cold War.

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has exposed a growing mismatch between the United States’ “America First” policy and its established role as the principal coordinator of transatlantic sanctions. This article examines how US–EU sanctions coordination changed in 2025 and assesses whether these changes represent temporary policy divergence or a more systemic transformation of the transatlantic coalition. The study combines Robert Putnam’s two-level game model with the concepts of wedging and binding. This analytical framework links domestic political constraints and ideological alignments to the cohesion of international coalitions. Empirically, the article applies process tracing to three episodes: the US decision not to introduce new sanctions against Russia on 24 February 2025; Washington’s refusal to support the EU initiative to lower the price cap on Russian oil in June–July 2025; and the unilateral US sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025, including subsequent exemptions and implementation delays.

The analysis yields four principal findings. First, the United States retained the sanctions inherited from the previous administration but reduced its proactive and coordinating role in developing new measures. This combination of regime continuity and declining leadership increased the asynchrony of US and EU sanctions policies without producing a complete breakdown of the sanctions coalition. Second, Washington increasingly preferred unilateral and discretionary measures over prior coordination with European partners. Even when these decisions were not explicitly designed to divide the coalition, their repeated use produced a cumulative wedging effect by weakening established expectations of consultation, predictability, and burden sharing. Third, the October sanctions against major Russian oil companies did not signify a restoration of the previous coordination model. They were primarily linked to US bilateral diplomacy with Russia and domestic demands for a tougher policy, while exemptions granted to Hungary and delays in implementation demonstrated the selective and transactional character of the new approach. Fourth, the European Union responded through binding strategies intended to preserve the appearance and institutional framework of transatlantic unity. These strategies included public declarations of solidarity, the rapid incorporation of unilateral US decisions into a collective sanctions narrative, diplomatic engagement with the US Congress and executive agencies, and closer cooperation with the United Kingdom. Their effectiveness, however, was constrained by the EU’s internal fragmentation and unanimity requirements.

The article further identifies ideological convergence between the Republican governing elite in the United States and Eurosceptic actors in Europe as an emerging mechanism of coalition fragmentation. Selective exemptions and privileged bilateral arrangements may place individual EU member states in differentiated legal and political positions, thereby undermining common European sanctions discipline. The findings suggest that transatlantic sanctions coordination is shifting from an asymmetrical but relatively predictable US-led model towards a fragmented and situational arrangement. Under this model, collective action depends less on institutionalised American leadership and more on temporary alignments among the United States, EU institutions, individual European governments, the United Kingdom, and domestic political actors. The transformation of sanctions coordination therefore reflects a broader revision of transatlantic commitments: sanctions are becoming less an expression of Western political unity and more an arena in which internal disagreements, ideological affinities, and competing national interests are negotiated.

Qasem Soleimani's assassination in January 2020 removed a central broker from Iran's regional security network at a time of intensifying economic, military, and diplomatic pressure. This article asks why Iran's regional policy has operated under increasingly severe strategic constraints in the post-Soleimani period. Drawing on Sprout and Sprout's distinction between perceptual and operational environments, it treats Soleimani not as the sole architect of Iranian regional influence, but as a mediating variable linking elite threat perceptions, institutional resources, and the management of Iran-aligned armed groups. The analysis reconstructs the evolution of Iran's regional policy before and during Soleimani's command and then examines developments after his death, including the US maximum-pressure campaign, the Abraham Accords, declining public legitimacy of the Axis of Resistance in Iraq and Lebanon, the growing leverage of China and Russia, and the regional conflict that followed 7 October 2023. The article advances four findings. First, the principal systemic pressures on Iran pre-dated the assassination. Second, Soleimani's personal authority, cross-institutional networks, and operational experience enabled Tehran to mobilise resources, coordinate allied groups, and deter adversaries more effectively than after his death. Third, his successor was unable to reproduce this personalised mode of command, contributing to greater autonomy and centrifugal behaviour among Iran-aligned groups. Fourth, the postSoleimani constraints are visible in Iran's declining capacity to protect senior partners, preserve political influence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and translate military presence into diplomatic leverage. The assassination was therefore not the original cause of Iran's regional difficulties; it acted as a catalyst that magnified existing vulnerabilities and accelerated Tehran's shift from assertive forward defence towards selective de-escalation and strategic patience.