Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan paid an official visit to Moldova, on October 17–18, after his trip had been postponed repeatedly since 2014 (Newsmaker.md, August 21). Historically, Turkey has played an important role in Moldovan politics, routinely acting as a broker between the central government... MORE

Mikhail Babich, Vladimir Putin’s newly installed ambassador to Minsk (see Commentaries, July 20; EDM, August 2, September 7), went on Belarusian television, on Sunday, October 21, where he declared that Moscow will view any attack on Belarus as an attack on Russia and will respond... MORE

On October 17, 18-year-old student Vladislav Roslyakov walked into his polytechnic school in the Russian-occupied Crimean town of Kerch, ascended to the second floor of the building and opened fire from a rifle. Roslyakov had planned the assault so that an explosion would go off... MORE

The massive strategic-operational war game Vostok 2018, held last September in the Russian Far East, officially involved up to 300,000 personnel and thousands of tanks and other heavy military equipment. Russian forces were joined by a mechanized brigade from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).... MORE

Today’s (October 17) news of a tragic attack on a school in the Crimean coastal city of Kerch (UNIAN, October 17) snapped global attention back to this Russian-occupied corner of Ukraine, which itself borders on a precarious security situation in the Kerch Strait and Azov... MORE

The heavy casualties suffered in early 2018 in Syria by the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company (PMC) working for the Kremlin, turned international experts’ attention to these groups and other irregular forces as tools of Moscow’s non-linear military operations and its commercialization of... MORE

The putative detachment of Belarus from Russia as well as a twin topic, the supposed annexation of Belarus by Russia, are never-ending refrains in both countries’ media. The former is predictably pursued by Russia’s media outlets, whereas the latter can generally be found by reading... MORE

The decision of Universal Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I to move toward granting autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (see EDM, September 13) is an existential threat to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his conception of a “Russian World” (“Russkiy Mir”). For one thing, the... MORE

The Latvian Russian Union (LKS) and Headquarters for the Protection of Russian Schools (HPRS) organized a demonstration in the capital city of Riga, on September 15. The publicized goal of the event was to “prevent educational reform in Latvia, which will lead to a total... MORE

Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Mujahedeen El-Khalq (MEK) was the subject of frequent attacks from Iranian-backed proxies, which overwhelmed their members residing in camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq. Before this, MEK, an Iranian dissident group, began living in Iraq in the early... MORE