Although North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s travels inevitably attract a lot of media attention due to his country’s inherent secrecy and opacity, expectations were not high for the summit with Vladimir Putin, on April 25, in Vladivostok (Kommersant, April 25). And to a large degree,... MORE

In the early morning of April 30, in Caracas, opposition leader, speaker of the National Assembly and the self-proclaimed interim president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, declared that the Venezuelan Armed Forces had abandoned the socialist autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. The “usurper” would be ousted, he... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin had long requested a meeting with North Korea’s youngish leader, Kim Jong-un, but it was only in mid-April that Russian diplomatic persuasion started to show promise. And a good-neighborly handshake between the two men finally took place in Vladivostok last week... MORE

The independent pollster Levada Tsentr regularly tests Russians’ attitudes toward former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and it recently published a report showing that love, admiration and respect for Stalin is now the highest it has been since 2000. Some 70 percent of Russians currently see... MORE

Myrotvorets, a controversial independent Ukrainian website that claims to track persons threatening Ukraine’s security, has called on the authorities in Kyiv to investigate Russia’s alleged use of cryptocurrencies (via the WEX digital currency exchange platform) to fund subversive activities potentially in support of one of... MORE

The political vacuum that emerged across Eurasia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw Russia’s former suzerainty over the former Soviet space contested by both the United States and China in a new and modified version of the “Great Game.” But today,... MORE

Barring a radical destabilization of Xinjiang or fundamental shifts in Central Asian countries and their relations with major power centers abroad, Beijing will “very likely” establish a network of its own military bases in the region over the next five years, according to Dmitry Zhelobov,... MORE

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has confirmed its involvement in the creation of a “sovereign Internet,” which marks part of its wider efforts to transform its system of military communications. This will involve the Russian military in the development of the Multiservice Transport Communication Network (Multiservisnaya... MORE

President Petro Poroshenko may be the most Moscow-hated Ukrainian politician today. The Russian state-run propaganda machine has been lambasting Poroshenko for months ahead of the March 31 presidential election, and top officials publicly joined in. According to the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev,... MORE

A high-ranking Gazprom official has admitted for the first time that liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from the United States have negatively impacted the Russian state-owned energy giant’s sales. Gazprom exported a record volume of gas to Europe in 2018, increasing its market share on... MORE