Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan held their fourth—although first “formal”—meeting, in Vienna, Austria, on March 29. The statement (Osce.com, March 29) following their talks, which were facilitated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group, highlighted... MORE

The past two months saw Armenia engaged in an extraordinary flurry of diplomatic activity. Shortly after the parliament approved the post–Velvet Revolution government’s draft foreign policy program in early February, an Armenian delegation led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan paid an official visit to Iran... MORE

A major challenge for Central Asia’s oil and natural gas industry has always been how to transport petroleum products from the landlocked region to global markets. That issue resurfaced last week (March 6) in Uzbekistan, where a delay in building a pipeline to export more... MORE

New natural gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean might be a boon for the European Union’s efforts to move away from dependence on Russian energy supplies. In the current complex energy game between Europe and Russia, Italy could play an important role as an entry... MORE

Swiss firm Vitol and Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR have been embroiled in a quarrel over the transportation of crude oil from Turkmenistan. While the respective companies and government officials from Azerbaijan, Russia and Turkmenistan have kept silent on the matter, media outlets tend to... MORE

Russia has positioned itself as the main supporter of Nicholás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, thus risking turning a crisis in a far-away country into an embarrassing political defeat. Official propaganda has amplified this issue. Yet, while 57 percent of Russian respondents in a recent poll... MORE

Those taking a stand on Russian-Belarusian tensions around the so-called oil tax maneuver (see EDM, October 1, 2018; December 12, 2018; January 14, 15, 2019) fall into two main categories: 1) ones carefully trying to examine the core of the issue and 2) politicized speculators.... 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

The two-year contract between the government of Georgia and the Russian energy giant Gazprom on natural gas transit from Russia to Armenia expired on December 31, 2018 (Georgia Today, January 21, 2019). And talks are now ongoing about extending or renegotiating this arrangement. Tbilisi and... MORE

On January 21, in Brussels, Russia and Ukraine held ministerial-level talks on the transit of Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine (TASS, January 22, 2019). The European Commission is chairing this process, and the ministerial meeting just held in Brussels was the second at... MORE