Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has publicly attacked his Ukrainian counterpart Victor Yushchenko and called his administration's policies deliberately anti-Russian. In an open letter and in a video posting on his official Kremlin blog, Medvedev accused Ukraine of supporting "barbaric attacks" by the pro-Western regime of... MORE

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, accompanied by Zefer Caglayan, the state minister responsible for foreign trade, visited Iraq on August 11, as part of an emerging strategic dialogue between Ankara and Baghdad. Prior to departing for Baghdad, Davutoglu held a lengthy press briefing and outlined the... MORE

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill visited Ukraine from July 27 - August 5 in order to suppress the pro-independence mood among the local clergy and more broadly, to assert Russian religious and cultural domination. Kirill made it clear that he would oppose plans, backed by Ukrainian... MORE

Hungarian MOL's oil-producing joint venture in Russia, ZMB, has gained a respite from the Russian authorities' threat to revoke its production license. ZMB (Zapadno-Malobalyk), a parity joint venture of MOL with Russneft in western Siberia's Khanty-Mansi district, had recently been warned by Russia's mineral resources... MORE

On August 10 the family of the celebrated murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who covered human rights abuses in Chechnya, issued a statement condemning a Moscow court's decision to refuse to reopen the investigation and to merge it with the main case, (designed to find... MORE

The Russian government began insisting in late July that gas from the Sakhalin-1 project must not be sold to China by its partners, including ExxonMobil, but instead diverted to meet the growing demand in Russia's Far East provinces. Many observers were shocked by what they... MORE

The Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) released its June figures on the industrial production index, which gave mixed signals concerning the influence of the economic crisis on the Turkish economy (www.turkstat.gov.tr, Press Release, August 10). The figures show that although industrial output is still down from... MORE

On August 3, the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill during his visit to Sevastopol stressed the importance of the work of orthodox clergymen in the Russian army. Kirill stated that the modern soldier must be "strong in spirit" and emphasized the importance... MORE

On July 31 the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, formally launched the construction of the 1,800 kilometer Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok natural gas pipe-line (ITAR-TASS, July 31). This new strategic pipeline is designed to supply natural gas to the population of the Russian Far East, so far deprived... MORE

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wooed Turkey's AKP government with grandiose vistas of a bilateral partnership on energy during his visit to Ankara (EDM, August 7, 10). Along with his proposal to build Gazprom's South Stream pipeline to Europe via Turkey's Black Sea economic zone,... MORE