For a week following the April 7 chemical attack in Douma (a suburb or Damascus, Syria), Russia was high-strung with anxiety about the United States’ forthcoming punishment of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Moscow issued every kind of denial that a crime had actually been committed,... MORE

From Moscow’s point of view, its loss of control over much of the Black Sea littoral and ports as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union is a serious problem, one that Russian moves first in Abkhazia and then in Crimea were intended... MORE

A near-perfect storm has rocked Moscow, starting at the end of last week. On April 6, the United States Department of the Treasury published an additional blacklist of wealthy Russian government officials, oligarchs and business entities that would be sanctioned for differing misdeeds connected to... MORE

The Ukrainian legislature, on April 5, appealed to the international community to stop the construction of the Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline, which is to carry Russian gas to Germany, bypassing Ukraine. The lawmakers said that the European Commission (EC) should consult with Ukraine... MORE

Italian state-owned oil and natural gas producer ENI recently halted a joint project with Russia’s state oil company Rosneft in the Black Sea, according to Russian media reports (Construction.ru, March 30). Drilling operations by the two companies at the Maria-1 well had started in December,... MORE

On March 29, during the ArmHiTec-2018 international exhibition of arms and defense technologies in Yerevan, Armenia, the government of Uzbekistan signed an agreement with Russia to purchase more than ten Mi-35M military helicopters (RIA Novosti, March 29). The deputy director of Russia’s Federal Service for... MORE

For Russian policymakers who took up their positions in the bureaucracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Africa may have been the least important continent on their minds. Even though Africa was the site of many pivotal Cold War–era competitions with the United States,... MORE

The fact that, last Friday (April 6), the United States Department of the Treasury published a new list of severe sanctions targeting Russian businessmen, officials and companies came as no great shock—rumors about that looming punishment had been swirling around Moscow for weeks. The surprise... MORE

African development hinges on a maddening paradox: its greatest asset—the sheer size and diversity of its landscape—is also the greatest barrier to its development. Landlocked countries are cut off from ports, and the difficulty of moving goods from country to country weighs down intra-continental trade... MORE

In his very first interview after taking office in February 2018, new Nepali Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli said his government would seek to revive a US$2.5 billion Sino-Nepali hydropower project on the Budhi Gandaki River (South China Morning Post, February 19). The project’s fate... MORE