*To read Part One, please click here.   Moscow’s official statements since February 24, 2022, concerning possible nuclear escalation should the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) directly intervene in the Russo-Ukrainian war represent a deliberate policy of strategic deterrence. Possible escalation... MORE

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western governments and analysts have periodically expressed fears that the Kremlin might try to escalate by using nuclear weapons. This anxiety stems directly from Moscow’s own nuclear threat rhetoric: indeed, Putin’s... MORE

On April 19, the Latvian Economy Minister Jānis Vitenbergs announced his government’s decision to support entirely abandoning natural gas supplies from Russia by the end of 2022 (Em.gov.lv, April 19). The strategy in that regard relies on expanding liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification capacity across... MORE

It is possible to argue that the weightiest consequence of the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September–November 2020 was not Baku’s victory over Armenian forces but rather the return of Russian troops to the region in the form of “peacekeepers” in Karabakh (see... MORE

In a throwback to Stalinist-era practices, Russian forces in Ukraine may have been using some of their own detachments as “barrier troops”—a term originating in World War II for so-called anti-retreat forces (Gazeta.ua, March 11; T.me/SBUkr, March 12). The deployment of such units to deter... MORE

As Russia continues to try to subjugate Ukraine in an unprovoked war of aggression, Belarus has endeavored to keep its options open (see EDM, April 18). Further evidence of this policy from Minsk came out on April 14, when Rikard Jozwiak, a Prague-based journalist of... MORE

Given the ostensible ties of Cossacks to the Don region, one might reasonably expect Russia’s state-organized Cossack movement to play a significant role in the battle for Ukrainian Donbas. And indeed, such expectations were borne out in a new report that “in recent times, in... MORE

Predictions of a decisive offensive in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on the one hand, and speculation about peace talks on the other hand, have gained new intensity in both Russian propaganda and Western commentary in recent days—however, neither makes much sense. Russian artillery... MORE

On April 16, a multi-party delegation of the Georgian parliament, on a visit to Ukraine, traveled to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where, according to multiple Western governments and representatives of the International Criminal Court, the Russian occupying forces committed war crimes against the civilian... MORE

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s large-scale and brutal re-invasion of Ukraine, the South Caucasus has inevitably received much less international attention. But tensions in the latter region have increased on three key levels: between Russia and the West, between Azerbaijan and Armenia,... MORE