Nine months ago, when Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced his seemingly eternal number two, then–prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, with a lesser-known bureaucrat, Mikhail Mishustin (see EDM, January 16, 20), few po­liticians and observers in Moscow took the new head of government seriously. However, since his... MORE

Alexei Navalny shocked the Russian political establishment by accusing President Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the special operation to poison him. Navalny, once a leader but who has now emerged as the top leader of the Russian opposition, is recovering in Germany and insists on... MORE

Abu Mohammed al-Julani’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has recently escalated its crackdown on jihadists groups and figures in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria (Step News, October 5). The formation of HTS from al-Nusra Front in January 2017 was accompanied by a declaration that the... MORE

The political difficulties and expenses Moscow will face if it seeks to more fully integrate Belarus (see EDM, September 10) are patently visible in the problems—albeit on a smaller scale—the Russian government has had over the past decade in its efforts regarding Abkhazia and South... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. For now, the Belarusian authorities are holding out confidently against regime change on both fronts: against the domestic opposition and against Russia’s initial regime-change project. The latter could be seen lurking behind the thwarted presidential candidacies of Valery... MORE

Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s armed forces are fighting over the disputed region of Karabakh. The two sides have been preparing for a renewed war over this territory since the May 1994 ceasefire agreement ended the previous hostilities, which the Armenians won, securing de facto control of... MORE

The Russian Armed Forces’ largest military exercise of the year, Kavkaz 2020, was held on September 21–23, in the southwestern part of the country (TASS, September 20). Although, officially, the Kavkaz maneuvers were presented as having nothing to do with Ukraine, some non-Russian experts warned... MORE

In August 2014, in retaliation against the West’s economic sanctions adopted to punish Russian aggression in southeastern Ukraine, Moscow introduced its own package of countersanctions. Kaliningrad Oblast (KO), traditionally heavily dependent on federal subsidies (Rambler.ru, November 9, 2018), was initially hit particularly hard by the... MORE

The Kremlin is conducting a regime-change operation in Belarus, the first-ever Russian operation of this type in its “near abroad.” Belarus’s presidential election campaign from May to August and the election‘s aftermath have provided the launching pad for this operation.  It is premised on the... MORE

Arriving at some clarity regarding the situation in Belarus has become harder than ever before. An unstable equilibrium begets a cacophony of opinions that do not lend themselves to generalization or to teasing out a common idea. Alexander Klaskovsky of Belapan writes, “[Presidents Alyaksandr] Lukashenka... MORE