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

Relations between the United States and Russia have continued to deteriorate in 2017 and 2018. In August 2017, US President Donald Trump signed into law a new bill called Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which extended the post-2014 Ukraine sanctions and enlarged their... MORE

On September 25–27, the Ministry of Defense Industry of Azerbaijan (MoDIAR) hosted the defense-industry exhibition ADEX-2018 in Baku, where leading defense companies from European and Asian countries showcased their latest military products (Mod.gov.az, September 25). ADEX turned out to be a useful platform to promote... MORE

News that the United States is weighing the possibility of establishing a permanent military base in Poland as well as Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly have both elicited spirited debates inside Belarus, providing useful insight into how the... MORE