Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka paid a two-day visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, over April 13–14. The trip had initially been scheduled for late 2020, but it was postponed due to two significant events (Azertag.az, April 14; Belta.by, April 15). First, the August 2020 presidential election protests... MORE

The international community has focused on Moscow’s buildup of forces on land adjoining Ukraine, concerned that such a concentration of Russian military power will be used against its neighbor (see EDM, April 8, 15, 19). But as Moscow routinely insists, it has the right to... MORE

The socio-political conflict in Belarus has the potential to grow even more acute, even though street rallies have all but disappeared and the authorities have, for several months now, pursued a harsh counter-offensive. Those arrests and firings continue. Thus, in Grodno, Andrzej Pisalnik, the secretary... MORE

On April 16, in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in person and with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who joined by video-link midway through the conversation. The three leaders’ shared goal at this juncture is to defuse the perceived... MORE

An extraordinary sequence of oscillating hostile and conciliatory steps between the United States and Russia was initiated by President Joseph Biden’s phone call to President Vladimir Putin last Tuesday (April 13) and is set to continue this week. The offer of a summit on neutral... MORE

Major General Mohammad Baqeri, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, and Colonel General Sherali Mirzo, the defense minister of Tajikistan, met last week (April 6 and 8) in Tehran, where they inter alia signed an agreement on creating a joint military defense... MORE

At the end of March, Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian minister of defense, gave a detailed interview to military magazine Arsenal Otechestva (Arsenal of the Fatherland) (Arsenal Otechestva, March 31). The article came out amidst growing international alarm about the quickly burgeoning concentration... MORE

As the tensions over the buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border continued to escalate, United States President Joseph Biden phoned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on April 13. Their conversation raised hopes in some quarters of an impending de-escalation around eastern Ukraine as... MORE

On the night of March 30, an Italian frigate commander, Walter Biot, was caught red-handed selling documents to Dimitry Ostrukhov, an employee at the Russian embassy in Rome (Repubblica, March 31). The documents, whose content has not been disclosed, are said to regard North Atlantic... MORE

On March 22, 2021, in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast about 350 kilometers east of Moscow, the Russian 96th Reconnaissance Brigade of the Western Military District exercised a scenario in which its forces, without firing a single shot, compelled a group of “terrorists” to surrender a simulated... MORE