On January 17, 130 families were resettled from the two Lezgin villages of Khrakh-Uba and Uryan-Uba, located on the border between Azerbaijan and Dagestan. The resettlement of ethnic Lezgins had been planned since November 2017, when the Russian authorities issued 138 accommodation certificates, providing 38... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. A popular saying among Russian military historians is that “the AK-47 is a weapon of the proletariat” due to this automatic assault rifle’s extreme popularity with insurgent forces in regional conflicts around the world throughout most of the... MORE

Complementing the Russian Armed Forces’ drive to integrate Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities, growing interest additionally centers on the development of new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). This links to General Staff perspectives on modern and future warfare, while drawing upon... MORE

Two weeks ago (February 5, 2019), the Lithuanian intelligence community released its annual “National Threat Assessment” (Kam.lt, February 5). As in the past, this report asserts that the greatest intelligence threats to Vilnius come from Russia and Belarus. But for the first time, it adds... MORE

At the end of January 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to the Maghreb, visiting Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. According to Lavrov’s spokesperson, the trip was conceived to discuss the state of “bilateral relations […] and the regional and international situation” in addition to... MORE

Mid-February registered a remarkable sequence of international forums, whose participants debated and sought to counter Russia’s power politics in Europe and the Middle East. First, defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had their regular meeting in Brussels (February 13–14) and then proceeded... MORE

On February 13, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, met for the fourth time over the course of two months (President.gov.by, February 13; Belta, February 6). As widely predicted, the agenda of their negotiations revolved around months-long unresolved economic issues.... MORE

Over the last month, Russian officials have suggested that militant groups in Afghanistan so threaten the countries of Central Asia that the latter should cooperate more closely with Russia in order to defend themselves. But in contrast to such campaigns in the past, Moscow is... MORE

A bipartisan bill introduced in the United States Senate—the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA)—has generated significant nervousness in the corridors of power in Moscow. If passed and signed by the US President, the bill could trigger new sanctions targeting Russian state debt,... MORE

On January 21, Sergey Chemezov (the CEO of the Russian arms producer Rostec) announced that, by mid-2019, Russia’s Armed Forces would receive 200 units of Pishal “radio-electronic guns” and Ratnik multifunctional infantry combat systems—elements specifically designed to deal with enemy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Among... MORE