Vital Interests: Dmitri, thanks so much for connecting from Moscow to participate in the Vital Interests forum. As the Director of the Carnegie Center based in Moscow, your insights will be of particular interest. Can you give our readers some background on the Russian Federation as it exists today and how it differs from the Soviet Union of the past?

Dmitri Trenin: Thank you John. First of all, the Russian Federation is the current Russian State. The Soviet Union was the previous version of the Russian State. When people conflate the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union, they're not entirely wrong. The Soviet Union was Russia just like the Russian Empire that preceded the Soviet Union. Just like the Tsardom of Muscovy that preceded the Russian Empire. Just like the ancient Kievan Rus or ancient Rus that was started in the 9th Century. That's the beginning of Russian statehood. Over the course of history you have different forms of the Russian State succeeding one another.

The current Russian State is the Russian Federation. Basically, my point is that the Russian Federation is not a new state. It's a very old state. The Soviet Union was one of its historical names. Today, if you compare the Russian Federation to the Soviet Union, well, Russia inherited about three quarters of the geographical size of the Soviet Union and about half its population as well as nearly half its industrial capacity.

The other former republics of the Soviet Union that are currently independent states starting with Ukraine, the Baltic Countries, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Belarus, Moldova, all these places were imperial borderlands within the Russian Empire and then republics successors to those borderland provinces within the Soviet Union. Moscow was the capital of the Soviet Union. Moscow is the capital of the Russian Federation. It has been the historical capital of Russia since the 14th or 15th centuries except  for a period of time, from the 18th Century until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, when St. Petersburg served as the capital of the Russian Empire, but otherwise, it has been Moscow.

VI: A significant fact regarding Russia is that it occupies an enormous land mass stretching from Europe to the Pacific. How does this define Russia?

Dmitri Trenin: Well, the two things that strike you when you take the flight from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast of Russia, fairly close to Korea and not far from Japan, the flight lasts about 10 hours and you take off and land in the same country. That's very striking. You do not cross seas or oceans, you fly over a massive part of the continent. It reminds you that this is a country that has land borders with Norway and North Korea, just think of it.

On the other hand, what also strikes you when you take that flight from Moscow to Vladivostok is that when you look down on a clear day, most of the way you don't see many traces of human activity. It's a sparsely populated country. It's one-eighth of the land surface of the globe, but it's also a country whose population is just 146 million people. It's less than one-half of the population of the United States.

The Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in terms of population at one point in history. Russia is now, I think, number nine.  It's a very sparsely, unevenly populated country. The most important thing I would highlight is that it's a country that spans geographically Europe and Asia. As I said, Norway and North Korea, those are the two direct neighbors of Russia.

Culturally, this is a European country. Russians are a European ethnic group. A large part of the country is in Asia, but people would be very surprised to see that places like Vladivostok or Khabarovsk on the Chinese border are as European as any other part of European-Russia or as any other place in Europe. That's very striking.

VI: Are people throughout the Russian Federation united by a common language and a national media that reaches across the entire span of Russia?

Dmitri Trenin: That's correct. It's striking how few dialects exist in Russia today. If you compare Russia to Germany, for example, a much smaller country, you find Germans in the north of the country, close to the Baltic Sea, or in the south of the country in Bavaria, close to the Alps, speaking distinctly different versions of the same German language. In Russia, basically, everyone speaks the same version of the Russian language.

VI: Let's talk about Russian society today. We hear a lot about the government but not much about the Russian people - what are people’s lives like, what are their occupations, what is the state of education and culture?

Dmitri Trenin: It's interesting. Russian society is changing so much faster and so much more fundamentally than Russian politics or even the Russian economy. It's a society that has gone through fundamental transformation in the last 35 years, since the start of the reform process initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev known as “perestroika.” That rebuilding essentially turned a nation that lived under a command economy into a nation that has embraced a fairly wild version of capitalism that was succeeded then by a more, let's say, statist version of that same capitalism.

It was a country that basically had no money in the sense that the West or even Russia today understands money. It was not so much a game of money as a game of resources in the Soviet Union. You could not buy certain things. You could only be assigned certain things, like an apartment. You didn't have private property. You could only have what was known as personal property. Then fast-forward to today, you have a country where money is, I think, exceedingly important and more important than it should be, in my view. The country is going through a transformation which is not without its difficulties.

Another transformation is that in the Soviet Union, you could move freely around this huge country but you could not get across those borders in any direction. The Soviet Union was safely isolated, from within and without, from the rest of the world. Today, you basically have a country whose population can move around, not only within the country but anywhere in the world. There are lots of people who will travel and take vacations abroad, of course. 

It also used to be a country that had a totalitarian, harshly authoritarian system that did not allow you to speak your mind publicly on sensitive issues. In the days of Stalin, which was, again, a period of paroxysm of totalitarianism, lots of people were sent to labor camps and punished for anti-regime speech and activities. Now you have a country that, essentially, has freedom of speech.

The idea that, in Russia, you cannot open your mouth and say something that's out of turn with the government, you cannot criticize Putin, or the way that Russia's ruled, is really quite wrong. You can do that. In fact I'm talking to you right now from Moscow and I have no concerns. I know that people will not raise an objection that I'm talking to an American criticizing or, let's say, giving my own views of the country. 

But there's clearly a limit to your political freedoms. You can say things but doing things is much more problematic. Starting a political party would be problematic. In other words, you will run into obstacles. Particularly, if you are an opponent of the system. It's still a huge step forward for Russian society when compared to the Soviet era.

VI: Dimitri, would you say that there is a free media in Russia? Is the media controlled by the state? Are independent television, newspapers and online forums allowed to function freely?

Dmitri Trenin: Let me tell you this. Television is largely controlled by the state. Largely does not mean 100% but let's say 95%. There are a handful of newspapers and radio stations that are openly opposed to the authorities but the distribution of print copies of Russian newspapers is miniscule. During the time of the Soviet Union, the country had the largest print runs in the world, in the days of Gorbachev. We're talking about newspapers having print runs of close to 20 million copies daily. Now I think the most serious newspaper in Russia has a print run of 100,000, and that's enough for the entire country. There are reasons for that.

The country is huge. People have gotten used to getting their news on the internet. When they do read a newspaper, they're more likely to look at the internet edition than to have a print edition. A lot of people are using social media as their prime source of information and discussion, of all things including politics. The messaging app Telegram is very popular in Russia. There are dozens and hundreds of Telegram channels. They're totally uncontrolled. All sorts of people writing all sorts of things - gossip, opinion, facts. Anything. Pro-government, anti-government. Pro-regime, anti-regime, whatever you want to call it. It's free.

There are a few things that are censored -  for instance pornography. I think that there's also a law against what's known as LGBT propaganda aimed at minors. Some religious sects are closely monitored for what is considered  manipulative methods that exploit people. I sit in Moscow and I think I have as much information as I would need and as much information as I would be able to access anywhere else in the world.

VI: In the day- to-day life of average Russians - would they work in a private economy, in small businesses, in large corporate entities, or work for the state?

Dmitri Trenin:  After a period of massive privatization in the 1990s, I would say that most of the Russian economy today, in terms of the percentage of GDP, is generated by those enterprises, companies, economic agents that are state-owned, or majority state-owned. For example, the flagship Russian companies, like Gazprom and Rosneft, are responsible for gas and oil respectively. They are known as state corporations but they're also publicly traded. They're not wholly owned by the state. They have to generate profit and they have lots of shareholders, including coming from the outside, including from the United States.

Small and medium-sized businesses, unfortunately, and this is man-made misfortune, find it hard to thrive in the Russian system because of petty corruption   A fairly small percentage, around 20%, of the economy is generated by small and medium-sized businesses, much smaller than it should be. As an ordinary person, you would buy flowers at the flower shop that is privately owned. You would go to a bakery that's privately owned, a hairdresser that's privately owned, those things. All of the supermarket chains are privately owned. There's a lot of private enterprise, but not as much as there should be.

There's a difference between larger private companies and small and medium-sized companies. The larger companies are in much better shape than the smaller and medium-sized businesses.

VI: Does the spirit of entrepreneurship find less favorable conditions in Russia?

Dmitri Trenin: I wouldn't say that. I would say it's a miracle that a lot of people still want to start their businesses. They often have to swim against the tide, but many of them manage.

VI: What about in the field of high-tech innovation?

Dmitri Trenin: High tech is interesting. In high tech you have several fairly large companies. Let me put it this way, Russia is one of the very few countries around the world that has its own equivalence, let's say, of Facebook. It's called the VKontakte. There's a competitor within Russia, a very powerful competitor to Google which is called Yandex. There is a thing called Mail.Ru. In terms of IT, Russia is fairly advanced. It has its own base, engineering base, a conceptual base that they operate on.

There is a spirit of innovation. Russians are not particularly good at manufacturing things, they're not like the Chinese in that sense. But they are fairly good at thinking things up, inventing something, coming up with unorthodox ideas. So you do find innovation thriving in the system, in the economy of Russia.

VI: Is the Russian education system, from high school to universities, up to modern standards and capable of graduating people to work in high-tech and innovative industries?

Dmitri Trenin: Higher education used to be truly world-class, I would say close to the top of the world, maybe on top of the world. When we talk about sciences and engineering, the Soviet Union was really, really very good. Since the end of the Soviet Union we've seen an enormous hemorrhaging of talent to other countries. The going was very hard in Russia immediately following the downfall of the Soviet Union.

It wasn’t the downfall itself of the Soviet Union or the emergence of new states out of formal borderlands. That's not the issue. It was the collapse of everything familiar. Collapse of the economy. Collapse of human relations. Collapse of morals. The worst people would come to the top and decent people would find themselves trampled upon by those “new men”, new Russians. That was very, very hard.

It's now getting a bit better. I think that what they've been trying to do is replace the traditional Russian system, which was modeled on Germany in the 19th century, with  something modeled on the U.S. with the equivalent of SAT tests replacing traditional exams. That has been very controversial. People basically are saying that instead of teaching people to think, you just make them learn certain skills. A lot of people complain that the standards at school and standards in higher education are still very much below the Soviet levels. That is unfortunately likely to be true for the foreseeable future.

VI: Russia was also known for its world-class culture - dance, music, visual arts, and literature. Has that also suffered because of the transitions that are taking place?

Dmitri Trenin: There was certainly retrenchment in the cultural sphere, but I think a lot of the arts have recovered. If you look at Moscow it is a thriving place for theaters, operas, ballet, and performing arts, and painting. It's really very high quality. It's also pricey. You want to go to a theater you would pay something very close to what you have to pay in New York.

For the normal Russian worker it’s too much frankly, it’s unaffordable. That is a shame. But otherwise, I think literature is suffering everywhere. I don't think we will ever get back to the halcyon days of the 19th century, or early 20th century. It used to be that a new novel could be the most important event, a novelist would be like the guru of the nation, or the conscience of the nation.

This does not exist in Russia anymore, but there's some good writers. You walk into a Russian bookstore you have lots of titles, many of them translated, but most are from Russian writers issued by Russian publishers.

VI: Natural gas, of which Russia has the world's largest deposits, oil, and then perhaps the arms industry are the bedrocks of the Russian economy, aren’t they, bringing in the majority of revenue for the government?

Dmitri Trenin: Yes, but with one important addition - agriculture. This is significant because, in the days of the Soviet Union, agriculture was the worst performing sector of the economy with insufficient output to feed the country. Nowadays, Russia could afford to stop buying food from Europe as a response to European sanctions for Crimea, Donbass.  So that’s what Russia did. It stopped buying European food. In the 1990s most of the food in Moscow supermarkets came from Europe. Today only a very small portion comes from abroad. Most of it is Russian grown and processed.

Russia has regained its former imperial position as a global exporter of grain to the world.  Agriculture. This growth is not the result of the revival of traditional agriculture but rather the development of modern agri-business enterprises. 

In addition to agriculture, mining and the production of metals is another growth sector. Much of this has also been incentivized by sanctions. There is a concerted effort by the government for import substitution so you have more and more things produced in Russia that used to be imported from abroad. There is also a revival of airplane production and aerospace. New models of passenger planes are coming into service as are innovative rockets. We see the Russians actively involved in the international space station and there are plans to further revitalize the Russian space industry.

There is an active shipbuilding industry, for example, new ice-breakers have recently been launched that will assist in the development of the Arctic, the Northern Sea Route around Siberia, close to the North Pole. That is a big program. There are things that are moving but not enough in my view. The economic model that Russia has been following prioritizes macroeconomic issues over growth.

VI: Dmitri, these new initiatives in aerospace and other industries, are they public-private partnerships with the government providing considerable investment funds?

Dmitri Trenin: That's correct. They're actually expanding the field for public-private partnership in quite a few areas.

VI: Is this a new economic model Russian leadership is advocating for more domestic production of consumer goods to make the country increasingly self-sufficient?

Dmitri Trenin: Yes, that is the intended goal.

VI: Does Russia have the money to do this? Are there sufficient government funds and private investment to encourage and grow these partnerships?

Dmitri Trenin: Well, that's a big issue. Not that Russia doesn't have the money. The problem is Russia is a major exporter of capital. We're talking about dozens of billions of dollars leaving the country every year. This is essentially Russian money that is sent by Russian businessmen abroad because they find it safer and sometimes more profitable to invest money abroad. Without a change in economic policy, I don't think we can have the level of investment that is necessary for any serious growth. I hope this changes in the near future.

VI: We've talked about what's going on inside Russia, what about Russia and the rest of the world? You have written that Russia is a lone power these days - that it is no one's overlord and no one's follower. How is Russia charting its own course in the world today?

Dmitri Trenin: This is another significant change that was brought by the demise of the Soviet Union. When you look at the state emblem of the Soviet Union it features the globe with the hammer and sickle emblazoned upon it. The name of the country during the Soviet period did not contain the word Russia. It did not contain any geographical definition. It was The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The idea was that one day that union would be universal. All nations would belong to that union, maybe not even centered on Russia. Vladimir Lenin, the ideological and political founder of the Soviet State, saw Russia as the vehicle for triggering a global proletarian revolution. He thought that Germany would have to be the leader. Russia was just a peripheral country, a match to light the fire, if you like.

The idea of the Soviet Union was very internationalist. It was linked to the idea of communism being the next and ultimate stage, the end of history, if you will. Communism would be the pinnacle of human progress. The Russian Federation is nationalist, not in the pejorative or derogatory sense of the word. It's a country, it's a large country. It's not a super-power. It does not have an ambition of becoming a super-power. It doesn't have the resources to become the superpower or a superpower. I think there will be only two superpowers in the 21st Century and that's the United States and China. Russia is playing in the first league but not in the premier league, to use a European football analogy.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Russia tried to accede to the West, to be part of Europe, becoming allies with the United States, but it still had a fairly elevated self-image. It wanted to be like a second in command after the United States and the larger West. Of course, that was not on offer. When the Russians realized that they would never be among the very key group of decision-makers within the combined West, they became resentful. They decided that it's better for them to step back and be their own masters, rather than being in the company of the Polands and Ukraines of this world. That's where we are today.

Russia does not aspire to be part of Europe the way it aspired to be 30 years ago. However, if you walk along the streets of central Moscow you would find yourself in a shining, glitzy, European city. Psychologically, particularly the Russian leadership, and I think the bulk of the Russian people, would dissociate Russia from Europe. You Europeans are what you are and we're Russians.

We don't have to define ourselves as something other than Russians. That's it. We're big enough, as I said, one-eighth of the globe. Our population is not very big but still it's bigger than any country in Europe, including Germany. It has more population than Japan. It's significant. Its GDP is small compared to its potential, but that's a good thing. You understand that you are underperforming rather than overvalued.

VI: Certainly, Russians want to be influencers. Russia in the Security Council, wielding its veto. Russia in Africa, in the Middle East,in Asia. They want to be in the game. There's no isolationist movement within Russia that I can see, is that right?

Dmitri Trenin: That's correct. It's important for Russian self-esteem to be seen as one of the movers and shakers of this world, to be part of the small group of nations that form the global board of directors. Russia doesn't want to be the chairman, doesn't want to be president of that board, but it wants to have what it does have in the UN Security Council: a veto right. Russia cannot make others follow its decisions but it can safely block any decision that goes against its interests. Of course, decisions could be taken at the national level, but then the Russians could claim that those decisions are illegal or illegitimate because they were not taken within the top body, which is the UN Security Council.

Also, they see themselves as a global power, not confined to the former Soviet Union. This is a legacy of the Communist period when Russia was global. It ran close to a hundred Communist Parties everywhere around the world, from Latin America to South Asia to Central Africa. It had dozens of client states. It had a bunch of satellite foreign bases and served as advisors to governments. It was very much a global adventure, that Communist period. It's still there in the sense that Russia cares about what happens, at least cares psychologically and mentally, in various parts of the world, but unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is not willing to spend money on lost causes.

The Soviet Union, as I said, would support those dozens of Communist Parties that would not exist without its material support. It would give very generous assistance to a lot of third-world countries that never repaid their debt. At the time of the demise of the Soviet Union, the debt to the Soviet Union was higher than the debt of the Soviet Union. Yet, the debt to the Soviet Union could never be repaid. The Russian Federation did repay everything that the Soviet Union owed to other nations.

It's much more pragmatic than it used to be, but it's still global. It's global not for the sake of fermenting a global revolution, not for the sake of undermining its chief opponent, the United States, every step of the way, which was the Soviet practice. They now look for their own interests. If they find them, for example in Venezuela, it is not about the U.S. It's about the oil, frankly. It is South Africa or the Balkans, or what have you. You can find places where there's a political interest but most of the interest is commercial.

Look at Russian military contractors. These guys are the antithesis to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union would send people to fight for ideology, for no money, to distant corners of the world. These new guys are out there for rent. You could hire them. They will fight for you, whether in Libya, or whatever. Frankly, I don't think that this is how it should be, but that's the way things are.

VI: Do you see the role of Russia as trying to do some good in the world, or are they, as they are sometimes accused, meddlers, disruptors, interfering wherever they can?  For example, how does the Russian government cooperate in the global effort to confront the challenges presented by climate change?

Dmitri Trenin: I think Russia is affected by climate change more than almost any other country in the world. Putin used statistics that said in Russia, global warming was happening two and a half times faster than the rest of the world, which is good in some respects because Russia is a cold place. It's one of the coldest nations on Earth. It's a northern country. It's not an eastern country.That makes your infrastructure in a vast territory of the country quite vulnerable - your houses, your roads, your railroads - and that's bad. There's an upside, there's another side to those developments but that's important.

In terms of the pandemic, Russia entered the race confidently. It's interesting here. Russians are not so much incentivized as mobilized. A threat can mobilize them more than, let's say, a material incentive. The threat of the pandemic, which has hit Russia fairly badly, and is still hitting it, did lead to accelerated medical research. Russia has joined the race for a COVID vaccine - they registered one vaccine ahead of others and other vaccines are in the pipeline.

Again, we're still at an early stage. We don't know which vaccines will be effective, which vaccines will not be effective, but the country is mobilizing. Are they going to share it? Yes, clearly, they're using it for political purposes. Russia has an enormous image problem. In many ways, thanks to the Western media. It wants to do something about it so they are trying to present their achievements, which are not as many as those of the Soviet Union. There's nothing to compare with the Sputnik moment but still, if they have something to share, they will share.

When you talk about meddling, from the Russian perspective, the meddling clearly exists, certainly in the information sphere, meddling in Western information spaces. To the Russians, this is their response to democracy promotion which is seen as undermining the Russian system, or as people would call it in the West, the Russian regime or the Putin regime. For many Westerners, this is fine. People who commit themselves to democracy and human progress, what have you, feel it is their obligation to fight against regimes like Putin's. Now Russia is engaged in pay back.

That's what we're seeing,  I think that, frankly, as would happen anywhere where there is a little bit of money to be made or a little bit of money to be used. People are overdoing it. It's just like, you see a proliferation today of programs in the West to fight disinformation, Russian disinformation, Chinese disinformation. This is a new cottage industry. That's normal. People will be people wherever they may live. I think that we live in a period of a Hybrid War, which is a modern equivalent of the Cold War.

I do not use the terminology of the Cold War because that's misleading. It's a different kind of confrontation, but confrontation does exist between the United States and Russia. Unfortunately, it also expands to Europe. It's a constant exchange of blows that's debilitating in many ways, it's very harmful, but that's where we are. I think that's where we will be for the foreseeable future.

VI: Russia has been very competitive in the arms race, especially the nuclear arms race. You've written that the end of arms control is upon us, and that's not going to be an effective means of global disarmament or nonproliferation. You think that deterrence should be what needs to be focused on. Can explain your attitudes on deterrence and arms control treaties? 

Dmitri Trenin: I think it's a sad fact that arms control is on the way out, but it's not just because the United States has withdrawn from some international agreements or agreements with Russia, whether it's the ABM Treaty in 2002 that constrained the ballistic missile defenses, or the INF Treaty that banned a whole class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, or the Open Skies Treaty. It's not just that. It's a change in the geopolitics of the world. The whole concept of these treaties and others like them was devised when there were only two countries that possessed those categories of weapons, the United States and Soviet Union.

The safety of the world depended on whether these powers agreed or disagreed on things, whether they regulated their arms race or not, whether they moderated their antagonism or not. Today, the United States is still a superpower. Russia is a nuclear superpower but it's not America's principal challenger. That’s China. But China is not party to those treaties and agreements. China is not willing to be a party for the time being. You have an asymmetry there. 

There are other countries who have also joined the nuclear club, like India and Pakistan. North Korea essentially has sent a message to the world that any country of small size, with a determined leadership, willing to face a global opprobrium over its actions: namely if that country wants to go nuclear, it will go nuclear. If it wants to target another country, any other country, including the mightiest of them all, the United States, it can do that. Just replace North Korea and the United States with any other pair of countries, and you see the message that it all carries.

Then, besides nuclear weapons, you have advanced, very accurate non-nuclear systems that can do the same job that, in the past, could only be done by nuclear. There is a change in doctrines that makes war winnable, at least some people think it would. There's a degree of confusion between nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-armed systems. They look the same. Unless you open the system, you don't know what you're dealing with, nuclear or non-nuclear. You have cyber. You have so many other things that did not exist when the arms control regime was initiated and developed.

Of course, there's a different public attitude, certainly in the West, when they address nuclear issues, arms control issues, strategic stability issues. In the 1980s, there was nothing to compare with the nuclear threat. Today, people don't talk about it at all. They talk about the climate, they talk about the pandemic. The threat from a nuclear exchange exists but people don't care about it anymore, which is interesting and dangerous. We need something new, and I don't think that it can be modeled on the Soviet, U.S., Russian arms control model. Parts of it could be but not the entire system. In my judgment, the most important thing that people need to worry about is strategic stability.

In the Cold War, strategic stability did not rest on arms control, it rested on deterrence. Deterrence needs to be made more reliable. There needs to be better context. There needs to be a safety net beneath or above the deterrence thing, so that we do not inadvertently stumble into a war that might go nuclear at some point. It's a totally different thing. Basically, my point is not that you shouldn't mourn the passing of arms control, it's fine with deterrence. No, it's that you should not be trying to apply old solutions to new problems. That's my message.

VI: The new solutions, the new attitudes of deterrence, where will these ideas come from? Will they come from international organizations, come out of the UN, come from the leadership in Russia, in the United States, in China? 

Dmitri Trenin: I think that these ideas need to come from all of the above. Certainly, those devising national security policies need to look beyond just arms control to deterrence, whether it's the United States or China or Russia or any other nuclear power. Unfortunately, people who are in government have only limited time to think broadly about issues. They have to deal with current affairs most of the time. The scientific community, think-tankers, the strategic community need to generate new, workable ideas. New ideas that are practical, that can actually be implemented, pose the real challenge.

Diplomats need to find ways of translating those ideas into diplomatic proposals and, again, something that would win broader support than just the nuclear powers. There is an issue of nuclear proliferation. Part of the issue is that the nuclear powers are not fulfilling their pledge to phase out nuclear weapons. In my view, nuclear weapons will for a long time remain the bedrock of stability. I'm not one who would support a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. I think that would only make the world safe for non-nuclear wars. I still have my reservations about the proclivity of the humankind to do bad things once in a while. Sometimes very bad things.

VI: Dmitri, we're coming to the end of our time. We've had a very interesting and wide-ranging conversation learning about Russia within and without. I thank you for that. There is obviously a good deal of work to be done to make a safe future for us all. Let's hope that cooperation with Russia is part of assuring a secure world.

Dmitri Trenin: I share that hope.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, has been with the center since its inception. He also chairs the research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program. He retired from the Russian Army in 1993. From 1993–1997, Trenin held a post as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. In 1993, he was a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.