
Latest Eurasia Daily Monitor Articles

Russia’s Armed Forces Strive for Command-and-Control Superiority in the Modern Battlespace
Russia’s General Staff has a long-established interest in automatizing and enhancing command and control, which has shown remarkable advances since the reform of the Armed Forces was initiated in 2008. These changes, propelled forward by recent experience of combat operations in Ukraine and Syria, are... MORE

Faced With Chinese Expansion, Kazakhstan Seeks Alternative Energy Markets
It could be assumed that the intensifying trade war between the United States and China would cause economic slowdown in China and result, in the long run, in the drastic reduction of Chinese imports of energy resources from Kazakhstan. But in his recent interview to... MORE

Beyond Syria and Ukraine: Wagner PMC Expands Its Operations to Africa
The terrible defeat suffered by forces of the Wagner Group private military company (PMC) at Deir el-Zour (Syria), in early February 2018 (see EDM, February 15, 20, April 19, 23), did not lead to the demise of this increasingly famous Russian PMC. On the contrary,... MORE

Russia Retreats From International Developments
The end of April was extraordinarily rich in high-profile international events—and Russia was conspicuously absent from all these dynamics. The president of South Korea and the North Korean dictator planted a pine tree of peace just to the south of the ceasefire line that still... MORE

New Sanctions Against Russia Weigh on Its Closest Trade Partners
The United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), whose responsibility is to enforce US sanctions against foreign countries and nationals, rolled out a new package of economic restrictions against Russia, on April 6. Following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia has... MORE

Kyiv Develops Ties With Ankara—in Moscow’s Shadow?
Ukraine has been exerting considerable effort over the last several years to forge closer links across the Black Sea with Turkey, which Kyiv views as a counterbalance to Russia in the region. The two countries’ leaders have been meeting regularly of late. Turkish President Recep... MORE

US-Kazakh Accord to Use Caspian Ports as Afghan Support Hubs Irks Moscow
Since 1991, two key questions have dominated discussions of the fate of the Caspian Sea: First, how will it be divided now that there are five littoral states rather than two, as was the case in Soviet times? And second, will this landlocked body of... MORE

Russo-Israeli Tensions on the Rise From S-300 Transfers to Syria
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) jets have been hitting Syria intermittently, primarily targeting Iranian-connected assets, but also attacking the air-defense installations of president Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) (Haaretz, April 10). Officially, the Israelis proclaim neutrality in the seven-year-long Syrian civil war, but the IDF... MORE

China and Georgia Deepen Transit Cooperation
On April 12, Georgia’s Economy Minister Dimitry Kumsishvili, along with three other high-level Georgian officials, participated in a joint People’s Bank of China–International Monetary Fund conference on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in Beijing. During the conference, Kumsishvili and Chinese Minister of Transport Li... MORE

Ukraine Restoring Military Base Near Hungarian Border
In recent years, Ukraine has been fostering a national ideology that has significantly impacted the quality of relations with its western neighbors, notably Poland and Hungary. Ukrainian national ideology, on the one hand, helps it to effectively resist Russian aggression; but on the other hand,... MORE