On October 26, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for the first time used the Turkish-produced Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) to strike at forces of the so-called Donetsk “People’s Republic” (DPR) militia in Donbas. According to the official statement of the AFU... MORE

On the eve of this year’s Day of National Unity, on November 4, ethnic Russians and migrant workers clashed in a Moscow neighborhood, leading to a media circus in which Margarita Simonyan of RT denounced “persons of Caucasus nationality” for attacking Russians. Chechen leader Ramzan... MORE

The global race for hypersonic weapons, or at least for technologies to reach hypersonic velocity, undoubtedly goes on. Russia is paying close attention to the research, development and testing of hypersonic missiles in the United States (TASS, September 27, 2021), China (RIA Novosti, October 21,... MORE

Like any other relationship, the partnership between Turkey and Russia has had its ups and downs, twists and turns. The downing by Turkey, in November 2015, of a Russian Sukhoi military jet predictably led to a cooling in relations (see EDM, December 3, 2015). Since... MORE

Recent publications in the Western media about the Russian military buildup along the border with Ukraine (Kyiv Post, October 31) provoked a new round of discussions about whether Moscow intends to resolve the Ukrainian issue by force. This worry was based on satellite images of... MORE

Russia has not entirely avoided contravening international laws and norms since the Geneva summit in mid-June, but its behavior has been an improvement compared to many periods in recent memory. United States President Joseph Biden impressed upon President Vladimir Putin, over the course of their... MORE

The recent defeat in the Estonian parliament of a resolution denouncing Moscow’s russification of non-Russian peoples reflects two diametrically opposed trends. On the one hand, the down-vote is a product of the increasing unwillingness of Europe and the West to focus attention on this issue—an... MORE

On October 29, Moscow and Chisinau agreed on a conditional resumption of Russian natural gas supplies to Moldova as of October 30. The Russian side had curtailed gas supplies to Moldova by one third in October, and threatened to discontinue the supplies altogether by December... MORE

At the end of October, the Russian Armed Forces staged a military exercise in Crimea to rehearse the defense of the occupied peninsula. The military deployed forces from the Southern Military District/Joint Strategic Command (Obyedinennyye Strategicheskoye Komandovanie—OSK) to the Opuk training ground in Crimea, where... MORE

Since Soviet times, Russian analysts have mused about the possibility that Germany might try to recover Kaliningrad, or East Prussia as it was known before Joseph Stalin seized it at the end of World War II. Later, during the 1990s, they focused on the risk... MORE