Since at least mid-October 2022, Iran and Azerbaijan have been grappling with the latest and most serious wave of escalations between the two neighboring, Shia-majority Muslim nations in recent years. The escalation has manifested itself most clearly through the war games being conducted along the... MORE

On October 24, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived in Georgia for a one-day working visit. The abrupt nature of Aliyev’s visit was characterized as “strange” and “mysterious” by many experts in Tbilisi (Civil.ge; Netgazeti.ge, October 24). Indeed, the brevity of the visit and its format... MORE

Video footage of how enthusiastically the inhabitants of Kherson, with tears of joy, greeted their liberators from the Ukrainian Armed Forces has spread globally (YouTube, November 13). Against this backdrop, the official published data on the results of the “referendum” held by the occupation administration... MORE

On October 19, Romania’s Romgaz and Azerbaijan’s Socar inked a memorandum of understanding expressing an intention to “explore the opportunity of jointly developing a liquefied natural gas project [LNG] in the Black Sea” (Romgaz.ro, October 19). Both parties committed to preparing a comprehensive feasibility study;... MORE

Dmitry Gurnevich of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) analyzed the biographies of Belarus’s top-ranking military officers and concluded that many of them were either born in Russia, graduated from Russian military academies, or both (Svaboda, November 3). Specifically, out of the nine top military leaders,... MORE

On September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the decree on the “partial mobilization” of Russian citizens (TASS, September 21). This decree caused mixed reactions across Russian society, despite the almost total public support for Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine. Indeed, rampant dissatisfaction has been widely... MORE

During his September 13 briefing, ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party chairman Irakli Kobakhidze noted that Georgian authorities had presented the idea of ​​holding a plebiscite wherein the Georgian people will be asked if they want to open a “second front“ against Russia in Georgia. Kobakhidze... MORE

Introduction: Turkey as a ‘Dronized’ Military Power on Russia’s Doorstep Geopolitically, Turkey is a game-changer. Without Turkey being a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the transatlantic Alliance would have had a truly different “mapping” of its surrounding environment. Such a “different mapping”... MORE

More than half of the estimated 700,000 Russians who have fled since Russian President Vladimir Putin declared partial mobilization on September 21 have mainly gone to four countries in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—among the relatively few places Russians can still enter freely without... MORE

Twenty-five years ago this month, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova formed the GUAM consultative forum to counter Russian efforts to keep them within Moscow’s orbit via the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and to promote their own integration with the democratic West (Guam-organization.org, accessed October... MORE