Faced with mounting combat losses in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to expand the size of Russian forces there, the absence of a general mobilization plan undermines the Kremlin leader’s claims and could trigger more domestic opposition (Meduza, May 5). As such, Moscow... MORE

As the Ukraine war has entered its fifth month, and two decades after Iran, Russia and India signed the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in 2002, Dariush Jamali, head of the Iranian-Russian Port of Solyanka in Astrakhan Oblast, announced that the first transit shipment from... MORE

While Western economic sanctions are aggravating Russia`s business climate and leading toward its largest economic crisis since 1991, Russia is hoping to cope with the impending crisis by replacing vestiges of its market economy with command-style administrative regulations and a planned economy (Vedomosti.ru, July 3).... MORE

Given how centralized the Soviet Union was and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is today, the role regions within the Russian Federation have played in promoting Kremlin policies in neighboring countries is often overlooked. But in Soviet times, Moscow regularly employed regions and republics along the... MORE

On July 9, Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson announced that his country will return confiscated Nord Stream One turbines to Germany, providing Siemens with a temporary exemption from the existing sanctions regulations (La Presse, July 9). The equipment was seized by Canadian authorities,... MORE

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) new Strategic Concept, approved at the summit just held in Madrid, strongly emphasizes Russia’s multidimensional threats to the Alliance. By way of response, the Concept singles out the task of deterrence and defense from among the Alliance’s core tasks... MORE

Spitzbergen, the largest and only continually inhabited island of the Svalbard Archipelago, located in the Arctic Ocean, 1,000 kilometers north of Norway, is on its way to becoming a new hotspot in the emerging cold war between the Russian Federation and the West (Nrk.no, June... MORE

After more than four months of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, open-source data confirms that the Russian Armed Forces lost, at a minimum, over 830 tanks and 1,650 different types of armored vehicles (destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured) as well as dozens of combat aircraft and... MORE

The Kremlin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine and ensuing international economic sanctions targeting the Russian Federation have already damaged Russia’s non-renewable energy export capabilities, hitting both the oil and natural gas sectors (The Moscow Times—Russian service, June 28). Now, those economic measures are taking... MORE

At the end of June, Uzbekistan’s central government published the draft of a new constitution that would strip the autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan of the right to secede, which heretofore had been guaranteed in the existing basic law. As a result, on July 1, thousands... MORE