During his brief tenure, the brash Russian ambassador to Minsk Mikhail Babich had repeatedly offended Belarusians and even President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. But his replacement by the more diplomatic Dmitry Mezentsev will not bring any fundamental change to Vladimir Putin’s overarching drive to absorb Belarus into... MORE

Despite modern Russia’s constrained resources, its foreign policy has long operated on a global scale. And one key area of this worldwide remit is increasingly Africa, where arms sales and security cooperation are again driving the diplomatic outreach. Thus, the past several weeks saw several... MORE

The government in Yerevan, formed by Nikol Pashinyan after the “Velvet Revolution” and snap parliamentary elections in 2018, is apparently facing its first serious crisis. Specifically, the start of the trial of former president Robert Kocharyan (in office in 1998–2008) and some other officials charged... MORE

A joint venture led by Russia’s Novatek has chosen the French-American company TechnipFMC to spearhead its new Arctic LNG 2 liquefied natural gas project on the Gydan Peninsula, in northern Siberia. The same Western firm previously oversaw the work on Novatek’s first LNG facility on... MORE

Russian diplomacy is well known for its apparent readiness to engage with all parties to the multiple conflicts in the Middle East, and this characteristic has recently produced another awkward tangle of opportunistic intrigues. President Vladimir Putin fancies himself a master of communicating with difficult... MORE

Relations between Turkey and Greece are the most fractious of any pair of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 29 member countries. Disputes range from contested offshore hydrocarbon exploration to Athens granting political refugee status to two of eight Turkish officers who fled to Greece... MORE

In spring 2019, two large protest actions broke out in the Russian regions and attracted unusually close attention from the national media. Even as opposition activity in Moscow (see Commentaries, March 21) had finally been declining, loud demonstrations erupted in cities such as Arkhangelsk and... MORE

Speaking at the 11th Arctic Council Ministerial meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, on May 7, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo warned that the pattern of aggressive Chinese behavior in other regions may give important indications to how China will act in the Arctic (Rambler.ru, May... MORE

Russians are not unanimous in their attitude toward Belarus. According to popular Belarusian online portal Tut.by’s Artyom Shraibman, politically influential Russians fall into three camps: Technocrats-Monetarists (e.g., Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev or former deputy prime ministers Arkady Dvorkovich and Anatoly Chubais), Imperialists (many “siloviki”—representatives of... MORE

On May 25, the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) ordered Russia to release and repatriate to Ukraine all 24 sailors and three naval vessels, seized through military force off Crimea’s coast exactly six months earlier (see EDM, November 26, 2018),... MORE