On April 29, a Long March 5B (长征五号B, Changzheng wuhao B) heavy rocket carrying the Tianhe 1 (天和一号) core module of China’s space station was successfully launched into low earth orbit from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, Hainan Province (Xinhua, April 29). It marks the... MORE

Antony Blinken is visiting Kyiv today (May 6) on his first bilateral visit as US Secretary of State to a European country (Ukraiynska Pravda, May 6). This choice should have been foreordained in view of Ukraine’s pivotal significance to the power balance in Europe and... MORE

Russian top officials—in particular, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (RIA Novosti, April 27) and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev (Kommersant, April 8)—have for weeks been talking about the deepening crisis in Russia’s relations with the United States while at the same time expressing some hope that... MORE

A recent wave of arrests of ethnic Ukrainians across the Russian Federation for supposedly organizing extremist groups and planning terrorist attacks has sparked fears in Ukraine that Vladimir Putin may seek to exploit these incidents to stage a provocation inside Russia. Such a scheme would... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. “We should not let Mr. Zelenskyy and his team off the hook, but let them twist [wriggle, squirm] there,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently told reporters (RIA Novosti, April 28). This is Lavrov’s own style of signaling... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent plan to emerge from his extended self-isolation with new energy did not quite work out as expected, and he clearly needed to pause. Last week (April 28), United States President Joseph Biden touted his achievements at the symbolic 100-day mark... MORE

Turkey’s plan to build a canal bypassing the Bosporus Strait and potentially upsetting the Montreux Convention (see EDM, February 9) along with Russia’s movement of warships from the Caspian to the Sea of Azov via the Volga–Don Canal in order to threaten Ukraine (see EDM,... MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be holding no cards in the event of a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy is known to believe that he holds the card of his personal charm and the moral card, but those do not count with... MORE

In a recent column published by RIA Novosti, the deputy chairperson of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, writes that Russia’s relations with the United States have reverted back to a full “Cold War” (RIA Novosti, April 23). Medvedev served as Russia’s caretaker president from... MORE

The next meeting of the Intergovernmental Council of the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) will be held in the central Russian city of Kazan, on April 29–30 (TASS, March 17). A key agenda item for the EEU member states may reportedly be to discuss the... MORE