Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov wants Moscow to allow regional leaders to organize non-Russian military formations on the model of one of the most legendary units of the Tsarist army in World War I, the so-called “Savage Division” (Dikaya Diviziya), which consisted of regiments largely but... MORE

Armenia has been in the grips of a mass public protest movement since early April, when opposition leader and member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan launched street demonstrations and strikes in cities all over the country against former president Serzh Sargsyan’s attempt to be named the... MORE

Moscow is a semi-deserted city this week due to the Labor Day holiday. Political life is also on hold, and even the relentless state TV propaganda machine appears to have taken a vacation. Meanwhile a peaceful revolution looks set to overturn the ruling regime in... MORE

Twice this past month, Russia’s Main Air Traffic Management Center provided indication that the Russian Navy planned to conduct military exercises, which would include the live fire of missiles, within Latvia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ): between April 4 and 6 (Bnn-news.com, April 3) and April... MORE

In response to Moscow’s threat to bottle up Ukrainian shipping within the shared Azov Sea, the Ukrainian government is currently considering a plan to block Russia’s use of the Danube River. Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry has proposed closing to all Russian shipping the canal in the... MORE

Russia’s General Staff has a long-established interest in automatizing and enhancing command and control, which has shown remarkable advances since the reform of the Armed Forces was initiated in 2008. These changes, propelled forward by recent experience of combat operations in Ukraine and Syria, are... MORE

The terrible defeat suffered by forces of the Wagner Group private military company (PMC) at Deir el-Zour (Syria), in early February 2018 (see EDM, February 15, 20, April 19, 23), did not lead to the demise of this increasingly famous Russian PMC. On the contrary,... MORE

The end of April was extraordinarily rich in high-profile international events—and Russia was conspicuously absent from all these dynamics. The president of South Korea and the North Korean dictator planted a pine tree of peace just to the south of the ceasefire line that still... MORE

The United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), whose responsibility is to enforce US sanctions against foreign countries and nationals, rolled out a new package of economic restrictions against Russia, on April 6. Following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia has... MORE

Since 1991, two key questions have dominated discussions of the fate of the Caspian Sea: First, how will it be divided now that there are five littoral states rather than two, as was the case in Soviet times? And second, will this landlocked body of... MORE