One of the trends surfacing in news reports about the North Caucasus insurgency this year is the presence of Azeri fighters within the rebel ranks. Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov also pointed a finger at Azerbaijan in a recent interview, claiming: “Most of the ammunition warehouses... MORE

Shootouts between insurgents and police and other violent incidents have been reported across the North Caucasus this week, a week which also marked the second anniversary of the proclamation of the Caucasus Emirate, the notional Islamic state declared by the radical Islamist wing of the... MORE

In 2003 a team of Russian foreign policy and energy experts wrote a 70 page memo about the role of Gazprom, the state-owned gas monopoly, in Russia’s domestic politics and the country’s foreign policy strategy. The document was distributed to a limited number of consumers... MORE

The Russian press has picked up a story first report in the Sunday Times from October 4, quoting Russian and Israeli sources, that the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had secretly visited Moscow last month to present President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin... MORE

Moldova's new government of the Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has inherited a deeply frozen negotiation process on the Transnistria conflict. Russia, a direct participant in the conflict, with troops in place, continues successfully to evade responsibility by portraying it as an internal Moldovan conflict... MORE

Last week the official Russian defense ministry publication Krasnaya Zvezda carried a three-part article devoted to the American officer corps and its professional experience. The article placed the American officer corps within a civil society, addressed the unique professional isolation of the officer corps, but... MORE

Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, fresh from the resounding victory of his party in the Japanese Diet elections, traveled to New York in late September and met (among others) with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. At their meeting... MORE

On October 1 the fall military draft began in Russia with the defense ministry publicizing its “serious reorganization of the enlistment offices system,” while admitting that recruitment levels had been adjusted downwards to 271,000. The scale of this change is staggering, which has provoked many... MORE

President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had a rare face-to-face meeting on the evening of September 30, about which no official information was provided apart from stating that they discussed the “social-political situation in the country.” There is indeed plenty to discuss, as... MORE

On September 29 the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka attended the end of joint military exercises at the Obuz-Lesnovsky firing range in Belarus. The two stage "Zapad 2009" (West 2009) began on September 8, involving a total of 12,500 servicemen,... MORE