With 28-year-old Anatoly Zemlyanka’s notorious killing of 23-year-old member Magomed Khasiev, ethnic-Russian Muslims are again in the spotlight. Khasiev (a. k. a. Yevgeny Yudin), an ethnic-Russian convert to Islam, came from the Ural region in Russia, while Zemlyanka came from the Siberian town of Noyabrsk.... MORE

Converging interests are prompting Italy and Russia to forge an informal partnership to deal with the Syrian conflict and the Libyan civil war, which are among the most pressing security challenges facing the international community today. For distinct reasons, Rome and Moscow strive for geopolitical... MORE

On December 7, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, gave her Nobel lecture in Stockholm (Naviny.by, December 7). The lecture was delivered in Russian, the language in which Alexievich writes. In it, she first dwelled on her post–World... MORE

Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov’s key energy company DTEK announced the restructuring of its $750 million and $160 million Eurobonds, which are set to mature in 2018 (Interfax-Ukraine, December 1). One of the main reasons for the company’s continuing financial troubles has been the war in... MORE

Moscow’s Insistence on Micro-Managing Dagestan Is Destabilizing the Republic Dagestani experts are sounding the alarm about a rise in ethnic tensions in the republic. Some analysts see Dagestan’s current governor, Ramazan Abdulatipov, as the culprit in the rising tensions because the republic’s Avar majority is... MORE

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in December 1991, its integrated military-industrial complex was shattered and split up among 15 newly independent countries. Ukraine received many significant assets, including top-notch fighter and aircraft plants as well as the USSR’s most advanced shipyards... MORE

“ ‘All progressive humanity’ is concerned by the periodic reports about the disappearance of this or that type of plant or animal, [but] we are much less concerned about the disappearance of nations and nationalities,” Armenian expert Gevork Pogosyan says. Yet, as the post-Soviet period... MORE

Despite both the ongoing tensions in Ukraine as well as Russia’s out-of-area air campaign in Syria, much of the focus of the Russian political-military elite is currently on Turkey, which Russian propaganda has demonized following the November 24 downing of the Su-24M over the Turkish-Syrian... MORE

On November 29, Transnistria—the Russian-supported separatist region of Moldova—held parliamentary and local elections. Despite predictions to the contrary, the opposition forces won a landslide victory, claiming 31 of the 43 seats in the local legislature (Novosti Pridnestrovya, December 2). Even if unrecognized by the international... MORE

Crimea, which had almost faded from the global political agenda following Russia’s ensuing military operations, first in Eastern Ukraine and then in Syria, has again reemerged in the headlines. Despite the Russian occupation, the annexed peninsula continued to receive all its critical goods, services and... MORE