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

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) jets have been hitting Syria intermittently, primarily targeting Iranian-connected assets, but also attacking the air-defense installations of president Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) (Haaretz, April 10). Officially, the Israelis proclaim neutrality in the seven-year-long Syrian civil war, but the IDF... MORE

Two informative interviews on issues related to Belarus were published in mid-April. Given by Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs and the chairman of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, as well as Svetlana Alexievich, the 2016 Nobel... MORE

This year’s FIFA soccer World Cup championship is being hosted by the Russian Federation, between June 14 and July 15. The quadrennial tournament will be held in eleven Russian cities, many of which are not particularly well known to people in the West. Hosting the... MORE

Undoubtedly, Russia’s planned construction of new offshore natural gas pipelines, namely Nord Stream Two and Turk Stream, represents an important element in Moscow’s struggle for domination of the European gas market (see EDM, April 11). However, the development and launch of these pipelines also carries... MORE

The popular mass protests that forced former Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan to resign as the newly installed prime minister of that country—a tactic he copied from Vladimir Putin (albeit with an added change to the constitution) to keep himself in power (see EDM, April 23)—may... MORE