Iranian-Azerbaijani relations have been firmly on track toward rapprochement since the election of President Hassan Rouhani in Iran and the subsequent progress on the nuclear deal and lifting of Western sanctions. In the last five years, the presidents of Azerbaijan and Iran met 12 times,... MORE

On November 26, a day after Russia attacked three small Ukrainian naval vessels attempting to pass through the Kerch Strait, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received official notification about this incident from Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. In addition to sharing with Merkel the details of the... MORE

Moscow is prioritizing the introduction and further development of high-precision weapons systems to boost its military capabilities. Most of these systems—both already actively deployed or still in development—had featured in Russian defense planning long before the United States announced this past February that it would... MORE

Words matter. If only because they have the power to nudge an individual to see things from a wholly new angle. In that regard, the exchange between Mikhail Babich, Russia’s ambassador to Minsk, and the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) proves particularly meaningful. Two... MORE

Although analysts in Russia, no doubt with official prompting, generally talk up the success of their country’s so-called pivot to Asia, in fact that policy has little to show for it after a decade of effort. Today, Russia is clearly dependent on China to an... MORE

Cossacks in Ukraine and Russia are not the unquestioning soldiers of empire and repression that Moscow, Hollywood and the Western media routinely portray them as being. Certainly, some of the neo-Cossacks that President Vladimir Putin has created to more or less surreptitiously carry out the... MORE

By mid-March 2014, Russian “little green men” took full control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. And on March 18, President Vladimir Putin made a jubilant address to the Russian Federation Council (upper chamber of parliament) on the “reunification” with Crimea, asserting, “In people’s hearts and minds,... 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

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s seven-hour marathon with reporters, on March 1 (see EDM, March 7), continues to reverberate in the media. Most of the discussions fall within one of four discernible themes. The first has to do with Lukashenka’s expressed proposal to revise the constitution. He... MORE

Moscow’s recent decision to extradite a Talysh activist to Azerbaijan was a not-so-subtle sign that reinforced previous impressions the Russian government is tilting away from Armenia and toward Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus. The Kremlin is anything but happy with Yerevan’s new government (see EDM,... MORE