The Second Central Asian Leaders’ Consultative Summit—involving the five Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—was supposed to take place during the Navruz holiday (March), in the Uzbekistani capital of Tashkent; but it ended up being postponed several times due ostensibly to... MORE

The Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) political-executive body, the Collective Security Council, held a session on November 27–28, in Bishkek, at which Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that member states “must leave orders of [the] Azerbaijani side to acquire new weapons unanswered” (Aysor.am,... MORE

One of the most commented developments in Russian business news this past November was the reported attempt to “nationalize” one of the country’s largest high-technology companies, Yandex. Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex holds 51 percent of the domestic market share in its category and is... MORE

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has marked this year the 25th anniversary of the OSCE’s Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security, 25th anniversary of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances to Ukraine (both pacts adopted at the OSCE’s 1994... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. The four “Normandy format” (Ukraine, Russia, Germany, France) leaders’ post-summit press conference (see Part One, EDM, December 11), unusually lengthy and detailed, allowed some instructive glimpses into their discussions behind closed doors in Paris, France, on December 9.... MORE

In mid-February 2015, the Ukrainian military was teetering on defeat. A sustained Russian-led winter offensive had begun a month earlier, when the dirt roads and fields in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region were frozen and drivable. The Ukrainians had been ousted from the Donetsk airport and... MORE

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to Azerbaijan on December 2–3. This came after his November 11 Yerevan visit, which caused an uproar in Baku due to Lavrov’s reference to the ethnic-Armenian population in Karabakh as the “people of Nagorno-Karabakh” and his oblique suggestion of... MORE

On December 4, the French newspaper Le Monde published a report arguing that at least 15 Russian spies allegedly belonging to “Unit 29155” of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) have been using the Haute-Savoie... MORE

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has confirmed a planned surge in the number of warships to be equipped with Tsirkon and Kalibr cruise missiles, which follows President Vladimir Putin placing similar emphasis on these systems during his recent series of meetings with defense industry officials,... MORE

On the personal level, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a great impression at the “Normandy” group’s summit in Paris, on December 9. Zelenskyy outshone Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron at this highly publicized heads-of-state/government gathering—the first after... MORE