Geopolitical Observatory on Russia's Key Issues

Mohamad Hasan Sweidan with Karin Kneissl.

Karin Kneissl is former Austrian Foreign Minister. She has written for The Cradle and Russia Today.

Mini Bio

Note that this bio is outdated. Karin Kneissl currently lives in Russia.

"Dr. Karin Kneissl is an energy analyst and author of 14 books on energy related and other topics. She was Austria's Foreign Minister from 2017-2019 and served 10 years in the foreign service. Fluent in Classical Arabic, among other languages, Karin currently lives in Lebanon where she is working on an upcoming book.

Dancing with Putin and Moving to Russia

One-time Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl dances with Russian president Vladimir Putin at her wedding in August 2018

From The Guardian in an article dated September 13, 2023:

An Austrian former foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, who became infamous in 2018 for dancing with Russian president Vladimir Putin at her wedding, has moved to St. Petersburg – along with her ponies, which were flown in on a Russian military plane.

In 2018, Karin Kneissl, then foreign minister of neutral Austria, made headlines when she invited Putin to her wedding. It drew widespread criticism, coming just months after some EU countries – excluding Austria – expelled scores of Russian diplomats in response to the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

The 58-year-old left the government the following year. A highly controversial figure in her own country, Kneissl moved to France in September 2020 and became a guest columnist for Russia Today, which is widely viewed as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.

In a Telegram post on Wednesday, she expressed astonishment that her move to Russia had become “political”, and said she had moved her “books, clothes and ponies from Marseille to Beirut via DHL” in June 2022 after being “banished” from France.

But Lebanon was only a temporary solution, she said, and she travelled to Russia every six weeks for work, where she is now setting up a thinktank.

“Due to sanctions there are neither flights nor DHL [for the move to Russia ],” she wrote. “I therefore had the option of accompanying a Russian transport flight from Syria to Russia, for which I am very grateful.”

Last week, Kneissl’s two ponies were flown to St. Petersburg on a military aircraft from the Russian air base at Hmeimim in Syria after it was diverted from carrying troops, according to a report by Russian investigative website The Insider.

In June, Kneissl unveiled the Gorki centre ("G.O.R.K.I")– a thinktank attached to St. Petersburg University to operate under her leadership. The thinktank was set up to “help define the policies for the Russian Federation” with a focus on the Near and Middle East.

In 2021, Kneissl joined the board of directors of the Russian oil giant Rosneft.

She stepped down in May 2022 after the European Parliament passed a resolution threatening sanctions against Europeans still on the boards of major Russian companies.

Multipolarity was triggered by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq

In an article with the tagline "Twenty years after the unlawful and destabilizing US-led invasion of Iraq, Washington must face the ultimate consequence of that war: UNSC powers China and Russia laying the foundation for a genuine, UN Charter-based system of multipolarism" dated March 20, 2023 at The Cradle, Karin Kneissl wrote in part:

"China and Russia and the multipolar order

Twenty years to the day, Chinese President Xi Jinping will embark on a three-day state visit to Moscow, and the focus will extend beyond bilateral energy relations, which have been a consistent priority since 2004.

As previously stated in their joint declaration in Beijing in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart aim to coordinate their foreign policy and advance it together. Their discussions may also touch on the Ukraine dossier, although media expectations in the west may be overestimated.

It may be pure coincidence that the meeting coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Yet it also highlights how extensively Russian and Chinese strategies have intertwined over the past two decades.

Today, increasingly, "orientation comes from Orient." Cooperative geostrategic leadership and sound alternative propositions to resolve global conflicts are being shaped in Beijing and Moscow – because the old centers of power can offer nothing new.

Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, a failed 'war on terror,' the proliferation of extremism, millions of dead and displaced in West Asia, and never-ending conflict, China and Russia have finally teamed up to systematically advance their view of the world, this time with more resolve and global clout.

As catastrophic as it was, the Iraq war ended the practice of direct US military invasions, ushering in a war-weary era that desperately sought other solutions. That global division of opinion that began in 2003 over Iraq is, 20 years later, being institutionalized by emerging multipolar powers that seek to counter forever wars.