The Russian government is increasingly concerning itself with the views and aspirations of the youth. Until recently, schoolchildren and students seemed quite indifferent to politics. However, young people made up a large proportion of attendants at banned opposition rallies this year—on March 26 and June... MORE

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has completed its plan, announced last year (July 9, 2016) at the Alliance’s Warsaw Summit, to deploy four multinational battalions to Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania as a counter to the apparent Russian threat on its eastern flank, in... MORE

No sooner had the uproar caused by Svetlana Alexievich’s pronouncement about Belarusian Catholics (see EDM, June 15) calmed down, than a new scandal broke. Now, Russians are the offended party. Alexievich is the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. Born in 1948, in Ukraine, to... MORE

In mid-June, the CEO of Russia’s gas monopolist Gazprom, Alexei Miller, paid a spontaneous visit to Yerevan, where he met with Armenia’s Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan. Official information about the meeting is rather scarce. Besides mutually exchanged compliments, reports mention plans for the exploitation of... MORE

In 1953, subscribers to the third edition of the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia were told to cut out the pages in one of its volumes devoted to a biography of the by-then-disgraced Lavrenty Beria, Joseph Stalin’s last secret police chief, and replace them with an article... MORE

Belarus hosted the trilateral military exercise Slavic Brotherhood 2017, on June 6–14, bringing together Armed Forces personnel from Russia, Belarus and Serbia (Vsr.mil.by, June 16). The maneuvers were headed by Lieutenant General Andrei Ravkov (the defense minister of Belarus), Zoran Djordjevic (minister of defense of... MORE

The trajectory of the manageable but mismanaged confrontation between the United States and Russia has fluctuated since the start of the year. And this past week, it registered at least four significant turns for the worse. Hopes for improvement in Moscow have all but dissipated,... MORE

Large-scale military exercises in South Ossetia (the region of Georgia occupied by Moscow as a result of the 2008 Russian invasion) involving units of the locally stationed 58th Army of the Russian Armed Forces came to a close on June 17 (Lenta, June 13). The... MORE

A series of military incidents involving the United States, Russia, and their allies in Syria and the Baltic region have additionally hurt already strained US-Russian relations. As sign of its acute displeasure, Moscow canceled high-level talks between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and US... MORE

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has preliminarily ruled in favor of the Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas firm Naftohaz Ukrainy over Russian Gazprom’s claims regarding its natural gas supply. The same court is yet to rule on another contract between Naftohaz... MORE