President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly (parliament), delivered last Wednesday, April 21, following a long delay, was anticipated to present a whole host of major surprises; but the speech turned out to be surprising only for its extraordinarily low content (see... MORE

President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual address to a joint session of both houses of parliament on April 21, in the historical Moscow Manege hall, adjacent to the Kremlin, with the entire Russian ruling political, bureaucratic and business elite present. The yearly presidential address was... MORE

*To Read Part One, Please Click Here *To Read Part Two, Please Click Here The Zangezur corridor between mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan across southern Armenia, if re-opened, will carry greater economic significance for the connected states than its geopolitical implications in the short to medium... MORE

The socio-political conflict in Belarus has the potential to grow even more acute, even though street rallies have all but disappeared and the authorities have, for several months now, pursued a harsh counter-offensive. Those arrests and firings continue. Thus, in Grodno, Andrzej Pisalnik, the secretary... MORE

An extraordinary sequence of oscillating hostile and conciliatory steps between the United States and Russia was initiated by President Joseph Biden’s phone call to President Vladimir Putin last Tuesday (April 13) and is set to continue this week. The offer of a summit on neutral... MORE

At the end of March, Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian minister of defense, gave a detailed interview to military magazine Arsenal Otechestva (Arsenal of the Fatherland) (Arsenal Otechestva, March 31). The article came out amidst growing international alarm about the quickly burgeoning concentration... MORE

*To read part one, please click here The unblocking of the Zangezur corridor will have wide-ranging geopolitical reverberations for both the directly concerned states, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and surrounding countries. For Azerbaijan, the reopening of the corridor has geostrategic significance in multiple domains. This route... MORE

Putting military pressure on Ukraine could have seemed to the Russian leadership to be the most practical way to assert Moscow’s central role in international affairs. The standard working assumption in the Kremlin is that facing a risk of violent conflict, the disunited West would... MORE

Moscow has long wanted to develop its railway network east of the Urals, both to promote the development of that largely road-less region and to expand the export of raw materials like coal. Those two factors continue to be important, but they have been joined... MORE

Three decades after the implosion of the Soviet Union, Kremlinology remains a useful tool for evaluating political developments in many former Soviet republics—perhaps nowhere more so than Turkmenistan, where opacity is such that even Russian specialists find it difficult to discern the reality behind political... MORE