On April 25–27, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka paid a visit to China to participate in the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, devoted to the Chinese government’s continental strategy of infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries in Eurasia and around the world.... MORE

Several Russian mainstream information outlets along with military experts and officials have, in recent months, presented a long list of achievements that are purportedly raising the country’s Air and Missile Defense Forces (Voyska Protivovozdushnoy i Protivoraketnoy Oborony—PVO-PRO) to a qualitatively new level. In addition to... MORE

On April 21, Georgian company Peri began construction on the Khadori-3 hydroelectric station (HES) with a capacity of 5 megawatts (MW). Construction started near the villages of Birkiani and Dzibakhevi, in Pankisi Gorge (Civil.ge, April 21). This Georgian region (not far from the border with... MORE

The recent series of mass protests in various Russian regions have differed significantly from each other in their goals. For example, residents of the Republic of Ingushetia demanded a referendum on changing the borders of their republic, speaking out against the secretive decisions of the... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin had long requested a meeting with North Korea’s youngish leader, Kim Jong-un, but it was only in mid-April that Russian diplomatic persuasion started to show promise. And a good-neighborly handshake between the two men finally took place in Vladivostok last week... MORE

One year ago, in April 2018, a quasi-authoritarian regime collapsed as a result of a nationwide protest movement in Armenia labeled the “Velvet Revolution” (see EDM, April 23, 2018). And the following December, the first non-fraudulent election in 20 years secured a comfortable parliamentary majority... MORE

Last week, Belarus’s President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s visited Turkey (April 16) and, three days later, delivered his annual report to the parliament and the Belarusian people (April 19). Following negotiations with his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Lukashenka pledged to boost bilateral trade from $1... MORE

Another oil and natural gas transit feud is brewing between Belarus and Russia, with President Alyaksandr Lukashenka threatening to disrupt pipeline flows to Europe and Ukraine in retaliation for Russian restrictions on Belarusian apples and pears (News.ru, April 12). Rosselkhodnadzor, the Russian agency that oversees... MORE

The Russian navy, the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), always a poor relation to the Russian Land Forces given geography and national traditions, has been contracting in size since 1985. Now, as Izvestia announced last week (April 18), it is going to decline still further because of a... MORE

The Kremlin is disappointed and angry with the Ukrainian presidential election’s landslide winner, Volodymyr Zelensky. The president-elect may have over-fulfilled Moscow’s forecasts by defeating the incumbent, President Petro Poroshenko, by 73 percent to 25 percent in the April 21 runoff (Ukraiynska Pravda, April 22). Moscow... MORE