The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) recently participated in an operation to free the Tuvalu-flagged OS 35 bulk carrier with help from the Indian Navy in the Gulf of Aden (The Hindu, April 9). The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) 24th task force in the... MORE

The United States’ April 7 cruise missile attack against a major Syrian airbase sent US-Russian relations into a nosedive. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s April 12 talks in Moscow with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin seemed doomed to fail. But Putin... MORE

This past January, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev attended a session on “The Silk Road Effect” at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, alongside Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili (President.az, January 19). Presumably, the intention of both leaders was to promote the importance of the... MORE

Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili traveled to Ukraine on March 27, meeting with the host country’s President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. The visit occurred within the framework of a GUAM summit. GUAM, a loose economic and political cooperation organization, brings together Georgia,... MORE

By certain measures, Russian-Turkish relations appear to be firmly developing in a positive direction, but in fact serious points of contention continue to undermine this rapprochement. On the one hand, earlier this year, Russia conducted its first ever joint military operations with a member of... MORE

The consequences of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s April 3 meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as well as the March 25 crackdown on the Freedom Day rally in Minsk continue to be vigorously discussed. These consequences are inter-related. Irrespective of some politicians’ intent to... MORE

The nearly five dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles that the United States fired on Friday night (April 7) at the Syrian Al-Shayrat airbase produced far more political resonance than kinetic impact. Nonetheless, Russian President Vladimir Putin found himself on the receiving end of the shockwave. He... MORE

The outbreak of the mass EuroMaidan street protests in Kyiv (2013) and Russia’s subsequent aggression against Ukraine convinced the Kremlin of the need to project Russian “soft power” to blunt any response from Europe. However, Western countries ostracized Russia particularly after it illegally and forcibly... MORE

Since 2001, Russian-Chinese relations have been largely grounded in security issues, both military and economic. The former is a shared perception of an increasingly aggressive United States and, in the case of Russia, concerns over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) deployments on the periphery... MORE

The Ukrainian delegation to the United Nations took the initiative to discuss the situation in the occupied territories of Georgia—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—at a recent meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) (Un.org, March 28). Volodymyr Yelchenko, the permanent representative of Ukraine to the UN,... MORE