The Georgian parliament voted, on September 8, in favor of naming former minister of internal affairs Giorgi Gakharia the country’s new prime minister. Ninety-nine members of parliament (MP) took part in the motion, and 98 cast their vote in favor of Gakharia’s government, with no... MORE

A constituent court of the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom may not use 100 percent of the capacity of OPAL, an onshore, German extension to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline. Gazprom is expected... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Vladimir Tsemakh, who topped Russia’s priority list in a recent prisoner release agreement between Moscow and Kyiv, was flown from Ukraine to the Russian capital; he may now be back home in the Russian-occupied Donbas territory (see below).... MORE

Russia declared the fifth Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), hosted in Vladivostok, on September 4–6, to have been the most “fruitful” since the event’s creation: reportedly, 270 contracts were signed with foreign investors and 8,500 guests (from 65 countries, representing 440 global companies/businesses) attended the forum.... MORE

Following last month’s (August 12) Caspian Economic Forum in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (see EDM, September 4), a number of Russian commentators celebrated what they saw as a victory of the “Russian-Iranian approach,” which seeks to promote north-south trade over the east-west flows supported by the three... MORE

On September 8, 2019, local elections occurred in many regions of the Russian Federation, including St. Petersburg and Moscow, where the city council (Mosgorduma) was reelected. The capital city’s Mosgorduma does not wield any real power. Its 45 members, excluding the speaker and a couple... MORE

On August 19, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev issued a decree on applying the “Agrarian Insurance Law” and establishing the “Agrarian Insurance Fund”—key steps designed to help diversify the South Caucasus country’s economy (Azertag, August 19). In recent years, diversification of the economy has become a... MORE

Moldovan authorities engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity over the last few weeks. This consisted of a particularly dense web of exchanges between Chisinau and Moscow, with only a few such threads connecting Chisinau and Brussels. The picture will soon be completed with one... MORE

The highlight of every combat training year in the Russian Armed Forces is the annual strategic-operational exercise, sometimes designated as a strategic command-staff exercise. These rotate in terms of the primary focus of the exercise on the basis of the Military District or Joint Strategic... MORE

Both Iran and Russia suffer from the United States’ sanctions: the former since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the latter since its 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. But in a recent bout of creative synergy, Crimean “deputy prime minister” and the permanent representative of Crimea to... MORE