In a surprising turnaround of previous policy, Russia’s Lukoil announced on May 16 that its oil will soon be delivered to Europe via the 1,093-mile-long, 1.2 million-barrel-per-day Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. The BTC pipeline transports oil from Azerbaijan’s offshore Caspian Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field, via Baku’s... MORE

Chechens confirm their brand worldwide every year. Unfortunately, it is not a brand of high fashion, or new direction in art or science. Chechens are regularly depicted as the bad guys prepared to fight anywhere in the world. The theme of the Russian mafia in... MORE

Ukraine’s president-elect, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, has received a broad popular mandate to promote closer relations between Ukraine and the European Union. On May 25, Poroshenko won 55 percent of the vote in the first round of a crowded presidential race (his score avoided a runoff).... MORE

On May 22, Alexander Lukashevich, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), grimly declared that there would be consequences for Georgia if it signed the Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union, which is scheduled for June 27. In a somewhat lukewarm... MORE

On the morning of May 24, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reportedly carried out a special operation jointly with police near construction sites in the village of Sagopshi in Ingushetia’s Malgobek district. According to eyewitnesses, however, the special operation looked more like the indiscriminate shooting... MORE

On May 29, in the Kazakhstani capital of Astana, the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed a treaty to form the Eurasian Economic Union (EaEU)—a post-Soviet reintegration project vigorously pursued by President Vladimir Putin. The EaEU will come into being next January, after the... MORE

President Alyaksander Lukashenka gave an interview to Ksenia Sobchak, a talk show host from the beleaguered Russian TV channel Dozhd (Rain), a mouthpiece of liberal Westernizers. Using the occasion, Lukashenka vented about his disagreements with Russia. For example, he averred that “from a legal perspective,... MORE

For most of the last half-millennium, the lands between Moscow and Berlin have thought of themselves and been thought about by others almost exclusively in terms of an east-west axis, as a battleground between the Russian state and European countries. But before that, they were... MORE

Russia’s official position on the current conflict in eastern Ukraine has been seen as especially hypocritical, given its own treatment of secessionist efforts of Chechnya. While Moscow supports and promotes ethnic-Russian separatism in Ukraine, in the North Caucasus it brutally suppressed persistent attempts of the... MORE

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has placed increasingly high expectations and demands on the domestic defense industry. Putin intermittently reminds the heads of the various defense companies that the modernization plans to 2020 are unprecedented, spending 23 trillion rubles ($670 billion) in the process. However, following... MORE