On March 4, Romania, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkmenistan held a ministerial meeting in Bucharest—the first such quadripartite gathering for these governments. During this meeting of their foreign ministers, the parties issued a joint statement reaffirming mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability... MORE

Russians are angry at the expanded presence of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ships in the Black Sea and especially in Ukrainian ports, viewing them as a challenge to Russian power and influence there. Some in Moscow and especially in Russian-occupied Crimea are even concerned... MORE

The Silence of the Muslim World Regarding Repression in China Throughout 2018, a steadily growing body of evidence revealed the existence of a vast network of detainment facilities in China’s western Xinjiang Province, in which hundreds of thousands of Uighurs—a Turkic-speaking and majority Muslim ethnic... MORE

Mid-February registered a remarkable sequence of international forums, whose participants debated and sought to counter Russia’s power politics in Europe and the Middle East. First, defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had their regular meeting in Brussels (February 13–14) and then proceeded... MORE

On January 26, Ukrainian State Concern Ukroboronprom announced an agreement between the Turkish company Baykar Makina and Ukraine’s state-owned arms trader Ukrspecexport (part of Ukroboronprom) to procure 12 Bayraktar TB2 operational/tactical-level strike unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for $69 million (Ukroboronprom, January 26; see EDM, January... MORE

The Donald Trump administration has moved beyond browbeating the European countries involved in the Nord Stream Two project and threatening sanctions against the natural gas pipeline’s partners; it is now making the same threats against its contractors. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her successor... MORE

Foreign affairs have yielded few successes and much chagrin for Russia since the start of 2019 (see EDM, January 14, 2019). Relations with the United States are going from bad to worse, as the inevitable collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signifies... MORE

Turkey and Ukraine are boosting their strategic cooperation in the military sphere. Last week (January 12), Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko stated that he signed an agreement on the purchase of 12 Turkish Bayraktar Tactical Block 2 (TB2) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for the Ukrainian military... MORE

Azerbaijan saw several important events in 2018—both domestic and external and sometimes interlinked. And a major takeaway from contextualizing the past year has been Baku’s cautious optimization of its existing balanced foreign policy. In particular, when looked at together, the events of 2018 suggest that... MORE

One of the most undesirable geopolitical scenarios for Russia would be the establishment of a strategic alliance between the two other major Black Sea regional powers—Turkey and Ukraine. Such an outcome would not only hamper the Kremlin’s plans in Europe’s East and the wider Black... MORE