In mid-April, Russia offered Moldova, at the latter’s insistence, an inter-governmental loan of €200 million ($217 million) on soft terms. Moldova’s Socialist-led government had planned this loan mainly for road construction, before the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic broke out. At present and in the near-to-medium term,... MORE

Russia and Moldova signed an inter-governmental loan agreement on April 17, in Moscow, at Chisinau’s insistence. Chisinau had initially sought a Russian loan for infrastructure development, but it may have to spend these Russian funds (along with Western assistance) to mitigate Moldova’s current fiscal emergency... MORE

During a videoconference organized by the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addressed the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh, but his remarks greatly incensed Yerevan (Mid.ru, April 21). First, he expressed support for the current “firmly established format” of negotiations between Armenia and... MORE

The E40 Waterway is a proposed 2,000-kilometer inland shipping route that, if completed, would connect the Baltic with the Black Sea and run through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine (Minskdialogue.by, April 20; see EDM, February 18, April 28). The project stagnated following the completion of its... MORE

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Ankara has apparently postponed the activation of the S-400 air-defense missile system it had purchased from Russia that had been planned for April 2020 (Hurriyet Daily News, April 29). Regardless of the COVID-19 justification, Turkey’s decision was, in fact, motivated... MORE

Eastern Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region—comprising more than half of the historical mountainous region of Badakhshan, which it shares with northern Afghanistan—is one of the most isolated, impoverished and unsettled places in Central Asia. Gorno-Badakhshan was a center of resistance to Dushanbe during the civil war... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   Beginning in 2019, Russia intensified its outreach to some Central African countries—particularly, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Republic of the Congo (hereafter, the Congo). Russian interests in the region are premised on a... MORE

Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions (see EDM, February 18). The European Union has labeled the project “E40,” and the United States... MORE

Following the large coronavirus outbreak in Iran, neighboring countries quickly closed their borders with the Islamic Republic. More than a thousand Turkish trucks carrying goods to Central Asia found themselves stuck at checkpoints due to the closure of the Iran-Turkey and Iran-Turkmenistan borders (Daily Sabah,... MORE

In response to mounting cases of COVID-19 in Russia, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree, on April 17, providing a financial reprieve for the majority of the seven million–eight million foreign migrant workers currently believed to still reside in in the country, with little or... MORE