On July 10, Armenia’s Security Council approved a new National Security Strategy. It is considerably longer than the previous version of this document, adopted in 2007 (Armenia’s first strategy planning document since the country regained its independence in 1991), and the updated strategy appears more... MORE

On July 17, Russia began massive “snap combat readiness” exercises of troops from the Western and Southern military districts, the Airborne Forces (Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska—VDV) and marines of the North and Pacific fleets. According to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the maneuvers (which concluded on July 22)... MORE

Following the outbreak of deadly Armenian-Azerbaijani border clashes on July 12 (see EDM, July 14, 16, 20 [1][2]), Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom reported that its local natural gas pipelines in Armenia were damaged, due to the shelling (TASS, RBC, July 14). Furthermore, the Moscow-led... MORE

Four days ago (July 17), Vagif Dargyakhly, the press spokesperson for the Azerbaijani defense ministry, said that if Armenia escalated its conflict with Azerbaijan further, Baku could consider targeting the Armenian nuclear power plant (NPP) at Metsamor. Azerbaijani officials have since retreated from his words... MORE

On July 12, the Azerbaijani border region of Tovuz and the Tavush region on the Armenian side became the new epicenter of clashes between the armed forces of the two states, with the involvement of heavy artillery and unmanned aerial drones (BBC News–Azerbaijani service, July... MORE

The bloodiest of all ongoing post-Soviet conflicts, that between Armenia and Azerbaijan, intensified again on July 12. Over three days, the fighting claimed the lives of 16 people, including an Azerbaijani civilian, making it the deadliest escalation since the April 2016 “Four-Day War” (Eurasian Times,... MORE

Armenian and Azerbaijani military forces are engaged in their most serious armed confrontation since the so-called Four-Day War of April 2016, when hundreds of soldiers on both sides were reportedly killed and wounded along the Line of Contact, which marks the frontier of Azerbaijan’s occupied... MORE

On July 12, the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan escalated into a major military confrontation along the state border straddling Azerbaijan’s Tovuz and Armenia’s Tavush regions (Jam-news, July 12). The clashes, involving heavy artillery as well as aerial drones, resulted in the deaths of... MORE

In early May 2020, media reports highlighted the construction of a large hydropower system composed of the Khudafarin and Qiz Qalasi (Maiden Tower) hydropower plants as well as hydro junctions and related facilities and bridges on the Aras River, which follows part of the border... MORE

On May 22, Armenian Health Minister Arsen Torosyan accused Georgia of hiding true statistics about the numbers of its people infected with the novel coronavirus and boasted that his country’s anti-epidemiological system was far superior to the Georgian one (Arminfo.info, May 22). His remarks sparked... MORE