Notes
The author thanks Jafar Ibrahimov for his research assistance.
Russia does have formal alliances with Belarus and with Uzbekistan, but these are limited partnerships at best.
The term BRIC, invented by Goldman Sachs in 2001, refers to Brazil, Russia, India and China as the four major economies set to play an increasingly large role in the global economy.
In December 2007, unclassified Key Judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, claimed that Iran appeared to have abandoned its nuclear weapons programme under pressure in 2003, but nevertheless warned that Iran's ongoing uranium enrichment programme raised serious issues about its future intentions about restarting the programme (New York Times, 4 December 2007).
Mir Vokrug Rossii: 2017 (Moscow, Council on Foreign and Defence Policy and Higher School of Economics), p. 106.
Radosław Sikorski quoted in ‘Russo–German Gas Deal Irks Poland’, 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2.hi/europe/4961186.stm, accessed 8 February 2008.
The Russian version is that the Baltic States voluntarily joined the Soviet Union and that the USSR liberated them from fascism. The Baltic States describe this liberation as involuntary occupation.