On September 7 in Paris, a regular session of the Franco-Russian Council for Security Cooperation turned into another French embarrassment over Russian procurement of Mistral-class warships. Russia is using bait-and-switch tactics. The defense and foreign affairs ministers, Anatoliy Serdyukov and Sergei Lavrov, officially informed their... MORE

On September 5, a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives attacked a Russian infantry military training camp near Buinaksk in Dagestan. According to official sources, four servicemen died in the attack and 35 were injured. Policemen who arrived at the site of the... MORE

The Russian defense ministry has announced that it will fully suspend the recruitment of new cadets for any of its military academies or schools for at least two years. The defense ministry is radically cutting the number of active service officers from 355,000 to 150,000... MORE

On August 31, Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, reiterated his previous appeals for the military industrial complex (MIC) to transform itself to meet the challenges of modernizing the equipment and weapons inventory, to achieve an unrealistic target of a 70 percent share of new systems by... MORE

Russia and Armenia have agreed to deepen their already close military ties, signing a deal that will strengthen Russian influence in the South Caucasus and could have profound implications for the unresolved Karabakh conflict. Amendments to a bilateral 1995 defense treaty were signed during Russian... MORE

On August 29, Chechen President, Ramzan Kadyrov’s, home village Tsentoroi (aka Khosi-Yurt) was attacked by a group of militants. Initial reports said there were ten casualties among the attackers and two among Kadyrov’s forces (RIA Novosti, August 29). Russian official sources stated that five civilians... MORE

Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, paid an official visit to Azerbaijan last weekend and added to all the protocol ceremonies an exchange of political gifts. Azeri President, Ilham Aliyev, wanted a substantial discussion of security matters, including Karabakh where a new clash had broken the old... MORE

On July 1, the Customs Union between Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus formally came into force. However, the occasion produced no cause for celebration among the members of the Customs Union. The reasons for such open pessimism over the future of this organization are becoming evident,... MORE

The crash of Moldova’s experiment with a parliamentary system of government (EDM, August 6), predictable though it was, could not have occurred at a worse time for the country. When this experiment had first collapsed in 2000, Moldova still had a margin for error at... MORE

On August 12, an apparent arson attack in Khuchada, a village in Dagestan’s Shamilsky district, sparked a fire in the home of the imam of the local mosque, killing him, his wife and their three children (www.newsru.com, August 12). On August 11, the first day... MORE