It took several month of intermittent talks between the United States and Russia and many multi-hour marathon sessions between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to hammer out the Syrian ceasefire agreement that went into effect on September 12.... MORE

Africa has never been a particularly high foreign policy priority for the Russian Federation. This is mainly due to a lack of resources and capacity in Moscow; for if those were present, an ambition to aspire to a role on the continent commensurate with that... MORE

Ramazan Khun, a Circassian activist from Russia’s Krasnodar region, posted an unusual online petition on the website Change.org. The petition calls on the Russian government, President Vladimir Putin, and the administration of Krasnodar krai to grant indigenous rights to the Circassians, who reside on the... MORE

Moscow is again stirring the pot in northeastern Estonia, trying to pit the ethnic-Russian community there against Tallinn. And it is doing so in the classic tradition of Vladimir Putin’s “hybrid” war: specifically, Russia is using a report prepared by the Estonian Security Police that... MORE

Every year, the Russian Armed Forces stage a large-scale training exercise to serve as the pinnacle of the combat training season. These annual major exercises are held, on a rotational basis, across Russia’s various military districts (MD), which also allows the General Staff to test... MORE

Sunday’s (September 18) parliamentary elections in Russia were preceded by perhaps the country’s most listless and dullest campaign in years. The official results rather persuasively underscore this characterization. For the third time in a row, the same four parties—United Russia (officially having received 54.28 percent... MORE

Last Sunday (September 18), Russians went to the polls to elect the seventh State Duma in the post-Soviet history of their state. It is extremely difficult to say how many of them actually cast ballots because the official preliminary data on voter participation (47.8 percent,... MORE

Antonov, Ukraine’s only designer and manufacturer of aircraft, has severed all ties with Russia, which had been its main market and partner for decades (Ukrayinska Pravda, September 10). This was unavoidable, given the de facto war waged by Moscow, which prompted Kyiv to stop Ukrainian... MORE

Starting in 2014, the jamaats of the armed Islamist underground movement in the North Caucasus began, one by one, to pledge allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (IS). Kabardino-Balkarian insurgents split into those who became part of the Islamic State and those who remained loyal... MORE

As the dust settled, following the conclusion of the September 5–10 Kavkaz 2016 military exercise, the Russian Armed Forces entered into a budgetary battle with the Ministry of Finance. Russian Duma elections are scheduled for next Sunday (September 18); therefore, the process of drafting a... MORE