Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held their fourth—although first “formal”—meeting, in Vienna, Austria, on March 29. The statement (Osce.com, March 29) following their talks, which were facilitated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group, highlighted... MORE

Georgia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held NATO-Georgia Exercise 2019—a computer assisted/command post exercise (CAX/CPX)—at the Joint Training and Evaluation Center (JTEC), between March 18 and 29. The NATO-Georgian JTEC facility is based at the Krtsanisi National Training Center, near Tbilisi. This year’s... MORE

The presidential elections in Ukraine last Sunday (March 31) were derided, denigrated and ridiculed by Russian propaganda, but they still marked a striking contrast with the severely controlled politics in Russia. In an odd historical coincidence, the last meaningful and even fateful elections Russia saw... MORE

On March 24, the United National Movement (UNM), Georgia’s former ruling party, held a party congress at which it approved Grigol Vashadze as its new chairperson (Civil.ge March 25). This does not mean, however, that UNM removed former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who founded the party... MORE

Vladimir Putin’s much-publicized program to promote import substitution is failing. Indeed, Russia may be in worse shape now than it was a decade ago as sanctions and declining earnings from the sale of raw materials leave the central government with less money to spend. Moreover,... MORE

A Russian task force of some 100 men has landed in the Venezuelan capital Caracas, arriving on two military planes—a super-large Antonov An-124 military transporter and an aging long-range Il-62M passenger jet, also belonging to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Both jets took off from... MORE

The Nursultan Nazarbayev administration has been—progressively since 2010 and, more recently, since 2017—laying the basis for a smooth presidential succession. And based on those developments, Nazarbayev’s replacement by a handpicked successor increasingly looked likely to occur before the end of February 2020 (see EDM, February... MORE

In March, the Mardzhani Institute of History, at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, launched work on a five-volume edition covering the history of Crimean Tatars. According to the project, its realization “should contribute to objective coverage of the Crimean Tatars’ history within... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated members of the country’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) on their professional day, February 27 (inaugurated in 2015), underscoring this service’s instrumentality in the “eradication of terrorists in Syria and securing peace in Crimea and Sevastopol during the historical referendum [sic]”... MORE

While Belarus’s self-awareness is generally on the rise (see EDM, March 19), it never stops being influenced by a wide spectrum of domestic and international affairs. Thus, a tussle between the Russian ambassador to Minsk and the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) continues to... MORE