conflict and save lives. If lives are more important than regimes -- and they are -- then this is the path to follow. Dmitri Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. The Diplomat Could China, Russia Rescue Iran? Meir Javedanfar June 8, 2012 -- Vladimir Putin has returned to the Russian presidential office.

make sure of this remains an open question. "Sooner or later the state will have to engage in dialogue with the Salafis," says Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center. But dialogue is not the Russian state's habitual tool for dealing with social forces that it neither understands nor controls. The dual terror att

-syrian-connection/> Instead of being the West's p=tential victim, Mr. Putin is now its vital interlocutor. Maria Lipman, a s=holar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center and a leading political analyst, said Mr. Putin's logic is simple= "You may denounce us," she explained, "but when it comes to the mos= important in