When a country is faced with demographic decline—an excess of deaths over births and a reduction in the number of individuals annually entering adulthood—one of the first areas its government must undertake hard choices is military conscription policy. That is exactly what the Russia government... MORE

On March 29, during the ArmHiTec-2018 international exhibition of arms and defense technologies in Yerevan, Armenia, the government of Uzbekistan signed an agreement with Russia to purchase more than ten Mi-35M military helicopters (RIA Novosti, March 29). The deputy director of Russia’s Federal Service for... MORE

For Russian policymakers who took up their positions in the bureaucracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Africa may have been the least important continent on their minds. Even though Africa was the site of many pivotal Cold War–era competitions with the United States,... MORE

The fact that, last Friday (April 6), the United States Department of the Treasury published a new list of severe sanctions targeting Russian businessmen, officials and companies came as no great shock—rumors about that looming punishment had been swirling around Moscow for weeks. The surprise... MORE

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani paid an official visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, on March 28. During the visit, Azerbaijan and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding on joint development of offshore hydrocarbon fields in the Caspian Sea (President.az, March 28). Remarkably, the names of the fields... MORE

When, in October 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Vladimir Vasilyev to take over from Ramazan Abdulatipov as head of the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, there were widespread hopes and fears that Vasilyev would transform the local political elite by a wholesale replacement of... MORE

Army General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, presented his reflections on future conflicts, on March 24. Notably, he argued that “the enemy’s economy and command-and-control system (C2) will be priority targets [for potential Russian attacks].” And aside... MORE

It has become increasingly common to proclaim the present standoff between Russia and the West as a “new cold war,” and one possibly worse and potentially more dangerous than the first because of a lack of agreed rules of play or crisis management. But until... MORE

Latvian President Raimonds Vējonis announced new amendments to the set of education laws regulating the transition of all secondary education (high school) within the country into the official state language—Latvian. The system of bilingual high school education is thus set to end by 2022 (Diena.lv,... MORE

The Airborne Troops (Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska—VDV) have been much less affected by the military reforms initiated in 2008 than any of the other services in the Russian Armed Forces. Unlike the Ground Forces, the VDV has pointedly retained its divisional structure, despite plans to move toward... MORE