The war in Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk did not stop when 2014 came to a close. Therefore, the $27 billion two-year assistance package, promised to Ukraine by the West last May, has turned out to be insufficient to keep the country afloat.... MORE

The foreign affairs ministers of Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine—the “Normandy Four” countries—met on February 24, in Paris, to review the situation in Ukraine’s east. Russian and proxy forces had captured Ukraine’s Debaltseve area on February 18, breaching the armistice signed at the “Normandy Four”... MORE

After losing the support of ethnic Russians who were once abundantly present in the republics of the North Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia), Moscow is constantly looking for ways to keep ethnic Russians in this part of the country. The pro-Moscow regional authorities... MORE

Most political commentators agree that the Minsk armistice negotiations over the war in eastern Ukraine have raised Belarus’s international profile (see EDM, February 12). Thus, according to Kirill Koktysh, a Minsk-born professor at the Institute of Foreign Relations in Moscow, the Belarusian government should take... MORE

As elements of the Islamic State (IS) infiltrate the territory of the North Caucasus, the looming question is whether the caliphate will have an actual impact on the situation in the region. As of now, it can be said with certainty that little has changed... MORE

As the Ukraine crisis deepens and European countries increasingly worry about the possibility of an all-out confrontation with Russia, the Kremlin has begun to make public the basic conditions of an overall political solution that could stabilize and deescalate the standoff. This week (February 25),... MORE

Russia has long harbored an expansionist drive to the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. And the prelude or precondition for Moscow to be able to make real progress toward securing its influence in these areas has been its domination of Ukraine and the Black Sea... MORE

The political and military terms of the Minsk Two agreement (February 12) and capture of Debaltseve by Russia’s proxies breaching the ceasefire (February 18) show the extent of Ukraine’s entrapment into Russia’s conflict stratagems. Russia has set those traps; the existing international system shows no... MORE

Following a series of fistfights between Chechen conscripts and other draftees in the Russian Armed Forces, a public scandal broke out in the 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade, based in the Stavropol region city of Budyonnovsk. On February 12, four Chechen soldiers were charged with assault.... MORE

Dagestan, the most ethnically complex republic in the North Caucasus, faces an ever greater risk that it will disintegrate as Yugoslavia did. This growing danger exists both because of the changing demographics and power relationships within this Russian federal-level entity and due to the growing... MORE