Russian President Vladimir Putin held a lengthy tête-à-tête with his Belarusian counterpart, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, on September 14, in Sochi—their first meeting since the outbreak of mass protests in Belarus against the flawed August 9 presidential election. Having mismanaged the election, used excessive force against protesters,... MORE

Moscow is stepping up its information campaign against the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by using classic mirror imaging. For more than a decade, Russian strategic bomber flights close to US and NATO airspace designed to test the response of local... MORE

Narratives devoted to the ongoing political turmoil in Belarus fall into two basic categories: emotional and analytical. Attempts to mix both genres do not succeed. “Even if the Belarusian revolution [sic] ends in defeat, it will still go down in history and will have a... MORE

Russian analysts fail to recognize that Warsaw no longer views the Intermarium—a historical term that today refers to the lands “in between” Russia and the West and the Baltic and Black Seas—as it did in the 1920s and 1930s but rather conceives it as a... MORE

A scandal surrounding the alleged “betrayal” by a high-ranking official of the presidential administration is rapidly gaining momentum in Ukraine. The situation curiously concerns the detention of 33 mercenaries from the Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner Group, in Belarus, on July 29. According to... MORE

Despite some disruptions to this year’s military training schedule caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (see EDM, April 21, 22), the Russian Armed Forces are preparing to hold their annual capstone strategic-operational exercise on September 15–26. “Kavkaz 2020” (“Caucasus 2020”) will feature large-scale drills spread across... MORE

Five weeks of peaceful mass protests in Belarus after the falsified elections on August 9, have profoundly changed this formerly rather stable and conservative country, impressed its European neighbors, and set a sharp challenge for Russia, which is tied to this partner in a peculiar... MORE

On August 28, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka threatened to redirect all of his country’s trade flows as well as the transit of foreign goods across its territory from Lithuanian ports to Ust-Luga and Primorsk, in Russia’s Leningrad Oblast, if Europe were to impose anti-Belarus sanctions... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   Regime change remains Moscow’s political objective in Belarus (see Part One). This is defined as easing out President Alyaksandr Lukashenka with his assent, as part of an internal constitutional settlement. Russia wants this settlement to be negotiated... MORE

What looks to the world as another “color revolution,” this time in Belarus after the August 9 presidential election, outgrew and overwhelmed an initial Russian operation against the disobedient President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The unforeseen, spontaneous popular protests against electoral fraud have compelled Moscow to change... MORE