The drawdown of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014 will limit the future potential of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). Moreover, the withdrawal has left defense planning staffs among International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) members trying to resolve the conundrum... MORE

Recent events around Belarus draw attention to a chasm between the Belarusian policies pursued by Russia and by the West. This month, Russia agreed to retain an unprecedented scale of duty-free oil deliveries to Belarus. Under the current deal, Russia exports crude oil to Belarus,... MORE

On March 7, Kazakhstan’s parliament ratified the bilateral agreement with Russia on the duty-free import of Russian oil into Kazakhstani territory. The initial agreement on Kazakhstani-Russian cooperation in the field of energy was signed back in December 2010, but it did not exempt hydrocarbon supplies... MORE

In the next five years, China will implement a series of transformative public sector reforms due to the convergence of several factors over the past year that have made China ripe for change. Most obvious among them is the fact that the party leadership chosen... MORE

For 20 out of the 22 years of Ukraine’s independence (with the exception of the period 2009–2010), the country’s domestic energy market has been dominated by opaque gas intermediaries. Gazprom’s Itera and Yulia Tymoshenko’s United Energy Systems of Ukraine operated during the first decade of... MORE

On March 22 in Copenhagen, the Danish and Turkish prime ministers, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Recep Tayyp Erdogan, witnessed the signing of agreements between subsidiaries of Danish Moeller-Maersk and Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) to develop a giant port near Izmir in Turkey. The petrochemicals holding... MORE

The Cyprus issue has dominated political debates and intrigues in Moscow through last week, turning into a test of sorts for Russia’s ability to respond to acute external challenges. The financial disaster on the island that has become so intimately familiar to many Russians has... MORE

Kazakhstan has become South Korea’s (also known as the Republic of Korea—ROK) main economic partner in Central Asia, and powerful complementarities exist between Astana’s desire for foreign capital and technologies, especially in order to develop its infrastructure and new high-technology sectors, and Seoul’s need for... MORE

On March 17, accompanied by an 80-member delegation, including many directors of state-run companies, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka left for a seven-day visit to Indonesia and Singapore (https://www.svaboda.org/content/article/24931615.html). On March 18, he reported signing export contracts worth $400 million in Jakarta (https://www.gazetaby.com/cont/art.php?sn_nid=54868). Two days prior... MORE

The Cypriot financial meltdown has rocked Moscow. Russia provided Cyprus in 2011 with a 2.5 billion-euro ($3.2 billion) low interest loan and believed the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should join in the bailout of a euro-zone member nation. Until now, the... MORE