Life in parts of Kenya’s traditionally Muslim coastal region has become a nightmare of beheadings and midnight raids by masked assailants, compounded by the ineptitude of local security forces. In Lamu County, a historic center of Swahili culture, growing ethnic and religious tensions have proved... MORE

A long-term turf war over defense spending, between factions within President Vladimir Putin’s entourage, has raged for more than a year in Moscow. The so called “party of peace”—Putin’s liberal-inclined economic advisors and officials, led by former finance minister Aleksei Kudrin—is promoting defense spending cuts... MORE

When Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was welcomed in Moscow, on October 5–8, both Russian and Saudi media sources rushed to call his visit an important milestone in bilateral relations (TASS, October 8). But with the initial euphoria from Salman’s trip to... MORE

China’s 19th Party Congress is now in full swing. On August 18, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping started the once-every-five-years meeting with a sweeping party work report laying out his accomplishments and plans for the future. While the Congress will see important changes in... MORE

The South Caucasus republic of Georgia is struggling with a plague of brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSB), or Halyomorpha halys. Originally native to East Asia, the BMSB is an agricultural pest that can cause widespread damage to fruit and vegetable crops, particularly when present in... MORE

By finalizing the construction of the Kerch Bridge (see EDM, September 6), Russia is completing its geopolitical project of fully cutting the Crimean Peninsula—which it illegally annexed in March 2014—off from mainland Ukraine. Russia’s chief gains from this effort are first of all to obtain... MORE

While Ukraine’s power plants are short of fuel, coal from the unrecognized Luhansk “people’s republic,” located in the Moscow-proxy-controlled eastern part of Donbas, has been smuggled to Poland, journalists from the Polish newspaper Dziennik have found. Doncoaltrade, a firm linked to Oleksandr Melnychuk, a former... MORE

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, paid an official visit to Uzbekistan in mid-September, highlighting improving relations between Central Asia’s two largest states. There, he met with his Uzbekistani counterpart, Shavkat Mirziyaev, for the sixth time since the latter took office last December, following the... MORE

The Russian government recently announced a hike in excise duties on ga­soline. The overall retail price will increase by more than a ruble per liter (6.5¢/gallon), or by around 2.5 percent of its current market price, by the end of the next year (Ekho Moskvy,... MORE

Despite the multiplicity of major and urgent international crises around the globe, Russia still finds time to invest its political resources in Venezuela’s long-running collapse. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin is meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, today (October 4), in Moscow, to discuss... MORE