On April 16, in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in person and with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who joined by video-link midway through the conversation. The three leaders’ shared goal at this juncture is to defuse the perceived... MORE

An extraordinary sequence of oscillating hostile and conciliatory steps between the United States and Russia was initiated by President Joseph Biden’s phone call to President Vladimir Putin last Tuesday (April 13) and is set to continue this week. The offer of a summit on neutral... MORE

Major General Mohammad Baqeri, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, and Colonel General Sherali Mirzo, the defense minister of Tajikistan, met last week (April 6 and 8) in Tehran, where they inter alia signed an agreement on creating a joint military defense... MORE

As the tensions over the buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border continued to escalate, United States President Joseph Biden phoned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on April 13. Their conversation raised hopes in some quarters of an impending de-escalation around eastern Ukraine as... MORE

High-ranking officials from Iran and Tajikistan made a total of three visits to Dushanbe and Tehran, respectively, in less than two months, a significant sign that after years of frosty relations, diplomatic ties are finally improving (Khovar, February 23, March 29, April 5). Even more... MORE

On the night of March 30, an Italian frigate commander, Walter Biot, was caught red-handed selling documents to Dimitry Ostrukhov, an employee at the Russian embassy in Rome (Repubblica, March 31). The documents, whose content has not been disclosed, are said to regard North Atlantic... MORE

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced today (April 13) that Moscow is sending 15 naval vessels from its Caspian Flotilla to waters off Ukraine to take part in military exercises there. Earlier, Russian and Ukrainian media had reported stories about a smaller number. Although the... MORE

Introduction The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has openly challenged Washington’s role as global rule-setter. The administration of CCP General Secretary and state president Xi Jinping (习近平) has also taken multi-pronged measures to counter perceived efforts by a U.S.-led “coalition of democracies” to contain China.... MORE

On April 4, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka proposed to “optimize” the number of Belarusian embassies and their staff around the world. Essentially, the Belarusian leader declared, if Belarus’s “diplomatic presence” in some countries has no “prospects” because of a minuscule volume of mutual trade and/or because... MORE

Putting military pressure on Ukraine could have seemed to the Russian leadership to be the most practical way to assert Moscow’s central role in international affairs. The standard working assumption in the Kremlin is that facing a risk of violent conflict, the disunited West would... MORE