On April 6, Italy’s Lazio Regional Administrative Court (LRAC) suspended the environmental impact permit for the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which would have allowed for the relocation of olive trees that obstruct the planned path of the pipeline in the Puglia region town of Melendugno (Italianinsider.it,... MORE

On April 12, the State Security Service of Georgia (SSG) released its annual report for 2016, assessing the country’s security threats (Ssg.gov.ge, April 23). Unsurprisingly, the report states that “the existence of occupied territories” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remains “the main challenge,” with the... MORE

An underage gunman with links to Russian neo-Nazi groups burst into a Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Khabarovsk, on April 21, and opened fire. According to the FSB’s public relations center “at 17:02 (10:02 Moscow time) an unknown person entered the FSB reception room... MORE

Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev authored an article, on April 12, in the government-owned newspaper Egemen Kazakhstan (in Kazakh: Independent Kazakhstan) under the intriguing title “Looking Into the Future: Modernization of Public Conscience.” The phrase “public conscience” actually stands for the way Kazakhstani citizens view themselves... MORE

The convocation, last February, of a Kurdish conference in Moscow that included the Yezidis (Aranews.net, February 16), combined with new Kurdish-Yezidi claims that the Russian military has promised to provide them with training (Deutsche Welle, March 21), have highlighted Moscow’s continuing effort to win over... MORE

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has outlined the country’s military modernization achievements in the context of the ongoing drafting and internal discussion regarding the new State Armaments Program to 2025 (Gosudarstvennaya Programma Vooruzheniya—GPV). Shoigu put forward a vision of greatly enhanced military capabilities, but he... MORE

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s official visit to Iran in early March 2017—his third in three years—was scheduled to include the testing of a section of a new railway along the Iran-Azerbaijan border. The Astara (Iran)–Astara (Azerbaijan) railroad is part of the North–South Transport Corridor (NSTC),... MORE

Uzbekistan’s new head of state, President Shavkat Mirziyaev made his first official visit to Moscow, on April 4–5. Though the visit was in fact the Uzbekistani leader’s third foreign trip as president, after traveling to neighboring Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, Russian commentators nevertheless called it Mirziyaev’s... MORE

This past week’s big and still developing story is the sharp escalation of confrontation on the Korean peninsula. But Russia, which has made itself a key actor to many current global dramas, from the French elections to the civil war in Libya, is not a... MORE

“Despite the declared truce, our forces have lost several [the exact number depends on the day] soldiers, several others have been wounded over the past day… Notwithstanding the casualties, the Ukrainian army has not returned fire.” This is how a typical daily press release put... MORE