Russia has perpetrated acts of war against Ukraine in the Kerch Strait and the adjacent portion of the Black Sea on November 25 (see EDM, November 26, 28, 29). Moreover, during the preceding months, Russia had systematically and aggressively obstructed Ukrainian and international shipping... MORE

The tweet by United States President Donald Trump, canceling his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was such a shock for the Kremlin that a response was postponed until “official information” would arrive (RIA Novosti, November 29).... MORE

The issue of naming a new secretary general of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has become another bone of contention between supposed allies Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The alliance’s heretofore formal head, General Yuri Khachaturov, a former chief of the General Staff of... MORE

“To say that the Russian media has been alarmed by the [recent] visitors to Minsk would be an understatement,” writes the online newspaper Ukraina.ru (Ukraine.ru, November 12), alluding to the November 5–6 trip to Belarus by a group of foreign policy analysts from the United... MORE

Russia has staged “republic“-level “elections” in Donetsk and Luhansk for the second time in four years, establishing a regular quadrennial electoral cycle there. This move is designed to perpetuate the “republics” de facto, institutionalizing them more firmly and exploiting a murky situation of undefined status... MORE

Speaking on the sidelines of this year’s East Asia Summit (November 14–15), in Singapore, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe agreed to step up negotiations on a bilateral peace treaty based on the 1956 Soviet-Japanese Declaration. At their previous meeting, just... MORE

The Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” (DPR, LPR) staged pseudo-presidential and pseudo-parliamentary elections on November 11 (see EDM, November 15), pursuant to decisions handed down from the Kremlin in early September (see EDM, September 12, 13). Along with the November 24–25 naval attacks on Ukrainian... MORE

Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, had to recently (November 13) explain that there was nothing extraordinary about the fact that President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev were out of the country at the same time (RIA Novosti, November 13). Medvedev’s whereabouts are... MORE

Washington has recently taken a tougher tack to growing inbound investment from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by strengthening the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but its security partners in the PRC’s backyard have not all followed suit (US Congress,... MORE

Kremlin-orchestrated, internationally unrecognized “elections” were held on November 11 in the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” (DPR, LPR), Russian-controlled territories in Ukraine’s east. The final returns, made public on November 14, serve to confirm and prolong the authority of the “head of the republic” (“glava... MORE