On May 30, the Verkhovna Rada (national parliament) of Ukraine appealed to the United Nations, international parliamentary assemblies and foreign national legislatures to condemn ongoing violations of the rights of indigenous non-Russian peoples in the Russian Federation (Rada.gov.ua, May 30). The resolution was supported by... MORE

The Russian newspaper Izvestia announced, on June 19, that the country’s newest super-maneuverable fighter, the Su-35S (“Flanker-E” in the NATO classification), will soon be deployed to annexed Crimea. According to Izvestia, “The Su-35S is capable not only of guaranteed destruction of fifth-generation fighters, but also... MORE

The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church wants to transform its headquarters at Sergiyev Posad into “an Orthodox counterpart” to the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca. Such a program could cost the country as much as 140 billion rubles ($2.3 billion), increase centralized control over... MORE

Russia launched a GLONASS-M 758 navigation satellite into orbit on May 27. The satellite became fully operational a month later, on June 22, replacing GLONASS-M 723, “which had exceeded its expected service life by some 50 percent” (Glonass-iac.ru, June 22). With the launch of GLONASS-M... MORE

The submarine tragedy in the Barents Sea on July 1, 2019, was quite different from the Kursk catastrophe of August 2000. The explosion that destroyed the nuclear attack submarine Kursk nearly 20 years ago was the consequence of a decade of decay and degradation, and... MORE

Russians have become increasingly concerned about Chinese economic and even demographic penetration of Siberia and the Russian Far East; but in most cases, Chinese actions have been blessed by Moscow, which sees them as a source of immediate profit regardless of what the longer-term consequences... MORE

Dmitry Kozak, Russian deputy prime minister and special envoy of President Vladimir Putin for Moldovan affairs, visited Moldova twice within three weeks (June 2-4 and 24–25) to facilitate the transition from billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc’s pocket government toward a coalition of pro-Russia and pro-Western parties. The... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told journalists in Moscow that an agreement had been reached with the White House on a meeting with Donald Trump on June 28, during the G20 summit, in Osaka, Japan. According to Ushakov, the meeting is... MORE

Despite official declarations to the contrary, June 21 passed by with no joint memorandum on deeper political-economic integration between Belarus and Russia. And while government-linked media outlets in Russia evince equanimity and even satisfaction about how these talks are allegedly progressing, the fact remains that... MORE

The United States Department of Defense released its new Arctic Strategy in early June (Defense.gov, June 6), and Russia’s leading information outlets responded by “reminding” that, by 2020, Moscow is planning to deploy a complex multi-branch force “capable of reacting to existing threats and protecting... MORE