Russia's Power Politics and North Korea

The sharp rise of oil and gas prices has enabled Moscow to utilise its mammoth energy reserves to achieve domestic and foreign policy goals. The new Russian ‘power politics’ have already been tested on the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and recently the Czech Republic. Russia’s Far Eastern frontier is now turning into the place where energy export becomes a political tool in shaping the country’s relations with regional neighbours. China, the two Koreas, and Japan are hungry for energy, natural resources and, at the same time, strive for economic and political cooperation. In such circumstances, the opportunities offered by trans-national railroads and pipelines appear to be more powerful than weapons. Given this new leverage and understanding, can Russia exert its soft and hard power upon North Korea in promoting the goals set in the Six-Party Talks

Pfaffian Stochastic Dynamics of Strict Partitions

We study a family of continuous time Markov jump processes on strict partitions (partitions with distinct parts) preserving the distributions introduced by Borodin (1997) in connection with projective representations of the infinite symmetric group. The one-dimensional distributions of the processes (i.e., the Borodin's measures) have determinantal structure. We express the dynamical correlation functions of the processes in terms of certain Pfaffians and give explicit formulas for both the static and dynamical correlation kernels using the Gauss hypergeometric function. Moreover, we are able to express our correlation kernels (both static and dynamical) through those of the z-measures on partitions obtained previously by Borodin and Olshanski in a series of papers. The results about the fixed time case were announced in the author's note arXiv:1002.2714. A part of the present paper contains proofs of those results.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 59 pages. v2: Added new results about connections with the z-measures and orthogonal spectral projection operators. Investigated asymptotic behaviour of the dynamical Pfaffian correlation kernel. Removed double contour integral expressions for correlation kernels to shorten the tex