Eduard Shevardnadze keeps a small piece of the Berlin Wall in his study, and the man who helped end the Cold War says the risk of a new one remains.

Twenty years after the wall came down, the former Soviet foreign minister who aided Moscow's reconciliation with the West says the world is a safer place, but warns against complacency.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is to deliver a speech at “The Modern State and Global Security” conference in the central Russian city of Yaroslavl on 14 September. One of the topics on the agenda is “Interstate Cooperation and Efficiency of Global Institutions,” and it is likely that its participants will discuss Medvedev’s idea for a new pan-European security treaty.

Russia is seeking a role in planning NATO’s war in Afghanistan two decades after Soviet forces were ejected from the country.

As East-West ties improve under President Barack Obama, Russia wants to be involved in setting the political, military and intelligence strategy for the war against the Taliban, said Dmitry Rogozin, Russian ambassador to the alliance.

Six countries trying to address concerns about Iran's nuclear program met in Germany on Wednesday, but the German government said it has received no official word yet on new proposals that Tehran is pledging to make.

Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, published a lengthy article Monday characterizing the Nazi-Soviet pact to divide Poland at the outset of World War II in 1939 as immoral, but he stressed that it was just one of a series of such deals that countries struck with the Nazis at that time.

The Obama administration has developed possible alternative plans for a missile defense shield that could drop hotly disputed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move that would please Russia and Germany but sour relations with American allies in Eastern Europe.

'The signals that the generals in the Pentagon are sending are absolutely clear: as far as missile defence is concerned, the current US administration is searching for other solutions than the previously bases in Poland ad the Czech Republic,' Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance, a Washington-based lobby group.

Mongolia, a nation with abundant mineral wealth, has emerged in recent days as a showcase for the US-Russian rivalry. The Mongolian military has found itself in the unusual position of participating in separate joint exercises involving US and Russian troops going on at the same time.

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, 45, says rumors surrounding the cargo of the hijacked freighter Arctic Sea stem from "Russophobia" and that the case highlights the need for close cooperation to stop piracy between Moscow and NATO.

SPIEGEL: Did NATO support Russia in the search for the freighter Arctic Sea?

Rogozin: I met NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on August 11, at his request, and told him that Russia was in a difficult position, we were looking for a ship, and asked if NATO could help.

Richard Pipes has an essay in today’s Wall Street Journal that purports to explain Russians’ many “complexes.” While there are some things to say about this part of the essay, I am less interested in that than I am in talking about Pipes’ policy recommendations. Essentially, Pipes spends a great deal of time explaining why all of our provocative policies produce such intense, hostile reactions in Moscow, and he then seems to endorse every last one of those policies. He then caps this off by saying that we should “convince” Russians that they belong to the West and somehow bring them around to adopting the political and economic model that they regard as utterly bankrupt on account of their experience in the ’90s. How we are supposed to do this is left to the reader’s imagination, because there is no way that Washington can continually align itself with overtly anti-Russian governments in neighboring countries while simultaneously persuading the Russian people that we are interested in their well-being.