The convoluted intrigue with revising Russia’s Constitution came to a logical yet shockingly abrupt conclusion on March 10, distracting the elites and society at large from worries about the coronavirus pandemic and pushing them to reflect on the new political reality. President Vladimir Putin set... MORE

Belarus continues to scramble in search of alternate oil sources two months after its traditional Russian suppliers halted flows through the Druzhba Pipeline (see EDM, January 22, February 13). The five suppliers that have provided Belarus with 90 percent of its oil for years cut... MORE

In the last several years, Turkey has shifted from promoting pan-Turkism in the Turkic-speaking countries of the post-Soviet space to backing neo-Ottomanism, a move which reflects both developments inside Turkey and Ankara’s assessments of what will best work for its interests in the post-Soviet space.... MORE

The Coordinating Council of Circassian civil society organizations of Kabardino-Balkaria appealed to the head of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, to recall the ambassador to Turkey, Aleksei Yerkhov. In a recent interview with the Abkhazian service of Sputnik News, the Russian envoy... MORE

President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, met for an emergency summit in Moscow on March 5, in a last-ditch attempt to defuse the confrontation in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. Syrian opposition fighters and Turkish forces in Idlib are fighting... MORE

Russia has a long track record of importuning the United States and its allies regarding arms control treaties and negotiations. But the sentiment Moscow presents to the West is far from altruistic. Indeed, having largely completed its nuclear modernization and reached the limit of what... MORE

A critical feature in the transformation of Russia’s Armed Forces since the political leadership introduced the reform and modernization efforts in late 2008 has been the extent to which older analogue systems of military communications have been digitized. This complements wider efforts to adopt and... MORE

On February 17, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) disrupted the activity of a network of “bot farms”—an extensive, organized effort to create “fake” (automated) social media accounts, which was found to be active across multiple regions of Ukraine. According to the SSU, the technical... MORE

The southwestern Russian Republic of Kalmykia has long hoped to become a major player on the Caspian, which it argues could be achievable with the construction of a new port on that inland sea along with a new canal from there to the Sea of... MORE

Hate crimes in Russia have decreased significantly since 2009–2010, reaching levels similar to Western countries in the later part of the 2010s (Sova-center.ru, accessed February 9). However, a recent report from the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis—a non-governmental monitor of extreme nationalism and racism... MORE