On June 5, Saudi Arabia announced it was cutting diplomatic ties with Qatar and closing its land border in response to Qatar “supporting terrorism.” Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates quickly joined, and all denied airspace overflight rights to Qatari airlines. Saudi Arabia and... MORE

In mid-June, the CEO of Russia’s gas monopolist Gazprom, Alexei Miller, paid a spontaneous visit to Yerevan, where he met with Armenia’s Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan. Official information about the meeting is rather scarce. Besides mutually exchanged compliments, reports mention plans for the exploitation of... MORE

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has preliminarily ruled in favor of the Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas firm Naftohaz Ukrainy over Russian Gazprom’s claims regarding its natural gas supply. The same court is yet to rule on another contract between Naftohaz... MORE

The Georgian coastal city of Batumi hosted, on May 23, a trilateral meeting of the defense ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia (Azertac, May 23). This trilateral cooperation format was inaugurated in 2012, during a ministerial meeting in Trabzon, Turkey. As expected, a new military... MORE

In spite of a blockade on shipments of anthracite coal from occupied Donbas to Ukrainian thermal power plants (TPPs) since this past winter, the country has thus far avoided blackouts. Moreover, Ukraine has managed to increase power generation by 2.1 percent year over year in... MORE

Moscow’s chief negotiator on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, Igor Bratchikov, stated, on April 14, at the international “Caspian Dialogue” forum in Moscow, that “the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea is almost ready, and the absolute majority of provisions have... MORE

On April 6, Italy’s Lazio Regional Administrative Court (LRAC) suspended the environmental impact permit for the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which would have allowed for the relocation of olive trees that obstruct the planned path of the pipeline in the Puglia region town of Melendugno (Italianinsider.it,... MORE

This past January, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended a session on “The Silk Road Effect” at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, alongside Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili (President.az, January 19). Presumably, the intention of both leaders was to promote the importance of the... MORE

Since 2001, Russian-Chinese relations have been largely grounded in security issues, both military and economic. The former is a shared perception of an increasingly aggressive United States and, in the case of Russia, concerns over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) deployments on the periphery... MORE

Ukraine’s DTEK Trading, owned by Rinat Akhmetov, and Moldova’s state-owned intermediary Energocom signed a one-year contract, on April 1, for the supply of electricity to Moldovan distributors. Energocom/DTEK’s only competitor was the Kuchurgan Power Station, which is located in Transnistria and belongs to the Russian... MORE