Over the past several years, Tanzania has served as an origin and transit point for radicalized individuals fighting alongside terrorist groups operating in nearby countries, particularly al-Shabaab in Somalia and Ansar al-Sunna in Mozambique. Tanzania has not been as internally affected by jihadist groups as... MORE

Russian officials and the pro-Kremlin press have been praising the successful offensive against Idlib by troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The northwestern Syrian province is the last stronghold of the anti-al-Assad opposition. All other such opposition-held areas across Syria have already been overrun... MORE

Russia’s political-military leadership has a long standing fear of a sudden air attack on the country, which still permeates strategic thinking and planning. Drawing upon lessons based on analyses of air operations carried out by the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),... MORE

Russia’s political-military leadership frequently criticizes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for its enlargement and for staging military exercises close to Russian borders. This pattern has intensified since Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent downturn in its relations with the United States... MORE

Tensions between Russia and Bulgaria looked on the verge of resolution at the end of last month. But trust between the two countries has since declined. In late January, Bulgaria announced its intention to replace half of its Russian natural gas consumption with volumes from... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   During a joint press-conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Moscow, on January 11, Vladimir Putin was asked about Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group private military company (PMC) who are reportedly operating in Libya. In response,... MORE

Editor’s Note: Recent issues of China Brief have presented two articles that analyzed aspects of the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak of a previously unknown coronavirus in the central Chinese city of Wuhan (The State Response to a Mystery Viral Outbreak in Central China,... MORE

At a summit in Istanbul, on January 8, 2020—an event officially earmarked to celebrate the beginning of exploitation of the TurkStream natural gas pipeline—Russian President Vladimir Putin and his host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sat down together to work out ceasefire agreements regarding Libya... MORE

In the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, the Russian Armed Forces—mainly via their “proxy,” Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army—are confronting Turkish military units (see EDM, January 30, February 18), putting severe strains on the Moscow-Ankara relationship. But Russian military activities along Turkey’s borders are not... MORE

In the positional war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas, where enemy trenches are often only a hundred meters away from each other, snipers have a target-rich environment and play a critical tactical role. As elsewhere, snipers in the Donbas war proved to be an... MORE