*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Removing officials loyal to Ukraine from local administrations and replacing them with nominees of the occupation authorities is a high priority of Russia’s occupation policy in southern Ukraine (see Part Two... MORE

Both directly and indirectly, Russia’s ongoing “special military operation” in Ukraine (launched by the Kremlin on February 24) triggers anxieties across the border in Belarus. Thus, on March 30, the authorities apprehended a group of perpetrators of the so-called rail-track war (see EDM, April 6),... MORE

Transnistria, the breakaway Slavic-majority region in Moldova, usually attracts attention only when Moscow seeks to use to limit Moldovan moves toward unification with Romania or membership in European institutions. At times, analysts also point to it as an illustrative model for Russian expansion or Moscow’s... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Russia’s 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine resulted, by mid-March, in the capture of Ukraine’s entire Kherson province, a considerable part of the Zaporyzhzhia province, and the littoral portion of the Donetsk province. Russia has decided to separate this latter... MORE

Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine, which commenced on February 24 (Kremlin.ru, February 24), pushed the world’s largest advanced economies to introduce several rounds of increasing economic sanctions against the Russian Federation (Meduza, March 8). While the initial impact of those punitive measures seemed... MORE

At the beginning of April, the hampered and decimated Russian forces that had been trying to conquer the Ukrainian capital retreated from the Kyiv region to resupply and regroup. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), a new potential direction... MORE

Russia has revised its war plan multiple times during the, so far, seven-week-long, ill-conceived large-scale invasion of Ukraine, yet it still remains incompatible with both tactical imperatives and political ambitions. The consecutive revisions themselves have been flawed in different ways: if the initial “Blitzkrieg” design... MORE

International sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of its massive re-invasion of Ukraine present both challenges and opportunities for Central Asian economies, which are spread asymmetrically across the region. Turkmenistan is, of course, an outlier case given its insularity and lack of truly verifiable... MORE

On March 31, Anatoly Bibilov, the so-called “president” of the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia—occupied by Russia since August 2008—announced that the local authorities would hold a popular referendum on whether to join the Russian Federation. “I believe that unification with Russia is our... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” against Ukraine in an early-morning TV address on February 24. Over a month later, beyond inflicting massive suffering and damage, few of Putin’s initial objectives in Ukraine have been accomplished, from defeating the Ukrainian Armed Forces... MORE