The incoming U.S. Administration and (less credibly) NATO declare their intention to augment forces and escalate combat in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, security risks have reached unacceptable levels on the route for military and civilian supplies into Afghanistan via Pakistan. The Pakistan route... MORE

On December 9 it was announced that a larger orange coalition had been agreed upon in Ukraine. It was formally registered on December 16. The news came as a surprise, as it had been widely assumed that Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc (BYuT) was close... MORE

On December 10 Chief of the General Staff Nikolay Makarov repeated Russia’s threat to deploy short-range Iskander (SS-26) missile systems as one of the promised countermeasures against planned U.S. positioning of several interceptors in Poland as part of the Ballistic Missile Shield (BMD). Makarov said:... MORE

Serbia’s coalition government has removed Economics Minister Mladan Dinkic from his concurrent assignment as head of the negotiating team on energy agreements with Russia. The impending oil and gas deals involve essentially a Russian takeover of Serbia’s energy sector. Dinkic and his colleagues who were... MORE

Five years after its establishment, Moscow will more than double its spending on the Russian military airbase in Kyrgyzstan’s Kant city. In 2009 and 2010 Moscow will spend 1.7 billion rubles ($60 million) compared with the 640 million rubles ($22.7 million) spent from 2003 through... MORE

In the wake of the OSCE’s year-end meeting, Russia is continuing to block the return of OSCE monitors to a South Ossetia ethnically cleansed of its Georgian population and occupied by massive Russian forces in breach of the armistice. The Russians have prevented the mission’s... MORE

Kyiv has suffered several setbacks in its Euro-Atlantic integration plans. The European Union came up with a collective plan for Ukraine and several other post-Soviet states that does not give Ukraine the prospect of EU membership. NATO refrained from offering a Membership Action Plan (MAP),... MORE

The OSCE’s Finnish chairmanship fell between two stools at the organization’s year-end conference on December 4 and 5 in Helsinki. Despite Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia, a chairmanship overly eager to produce a final political declaration by consensus gave in to Russia on basic issues... MORE

In 2006, when oil and natural gas prices began steadily climbing, Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom announced that it had ambitions to become a leading Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) supplier to the enormous U.S. gas market. Gazprom and its Kremlin masters were eager to claim... MORE