Russia has promoted the Northern Sea Route with the expectation that China will be a major user. And it is assertively advocating for the development of natural resources, such as natural gas in the Arctic, with the hope that China will be a major customer.... MORE

On January 28, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka delivered his state of the country address to the Belarusian parliament (YouTube, January 28). This is an annual event, though, in 2021, he skipped it altogether. This last speech lasted 2 hours and 36 minutes; in addition, Lukashenka spent... MORE

Amidst the Russian military buildup on the border with Ukraine and speculation about whether the Kremlin will, indeed, again invade (see EDM, January 18, 20, 27), the analytical discussion has focused less on what pretext(s) for war Moscow might put forward to “legitimate” any such... MORE

The Russian Ministry of Defense reportedly plans to create a new naval formation, an Arctic Fleet, to ensure the safety of Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the Arctic littoral region as a whole (TASS, October 7, 2021). According to experts, the creation of this... MORE

On January 17, the government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian appointed a ten-member working group to handle the reconstruction of the railway tracks connecting Yeraskh (Ararat province of Armenia) and the northwestern tip of Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave (Arka.am, January 17). The group will also... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov is content with the resumption of the quadrilateral (Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany) Normandy process and the direction it seems to be taking (see Part One). The outlook, according to Peskov, is “not bad at... MORE

On January 26, in Paris, senior political advisors to the Russian, Ukrainian, German and French heads of state and government convened to “reanimate” (such is the term in circulation) the quadrilateral “Normandy” process of consultations. The meeting, lasting eight and a half hours (almost twice... MORE

On January 22, civil society activists from the The Shame Movement and multiple other pro-Western non-governmental organizations (NGO) gathered near the Embassy of Ukraine in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. While the rally was joined by many public figures and representatives of political parties, not a single... MORE

The Christian Turkic Gagauz minority in southeastern Moldova typically attracts attention only when the Kremlin seeks to use it, in combination with Transnistria, to pursue Russian interests. Those objectives are most often to put pressure on Chisinau to prevent or derail Moldova’s turn to the... MORE

On Wednesday, January 26, the United States’ ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, personally delivered a memorandum to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs containing the official US reply to earlier Russian demands on security guarantees. Simultaneously, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) handed over to... MORE