Moscow wishes to expand its military-political influence in the Middle East by drawing into the war in Syria members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russian-led, amorphous military bloc that also includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. On June 22, the chairman... MORE

Last Friday’s (July 7) meeting between President of the United States Donald Trump, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, was so intensely anticipated and so poorly prepared in terms of the agenda that its outcome remains broadly open... MORE

On July 4, North Korea launched a multi-stage Hwasong-14 ballistic missile. During the flight test, the missile reached an altitude of 2,300 km and a lateral distance of 900 km (People’s Daily, July 4). Though the test followed a “lobbed” trajectory (higher altitude over a... MORE

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