The Second World Congress of Crimean Tatars (Butun Dunya Qirim Kongresi—BDQK) took place in Ankara, Turkey, from July 31 to August 2. Among the 600 participants, 410 were registered delegates representing 184 Crimean Tatar organizations from twelve different countries: Ukraine, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia,... MORE

Reports of the alleged troop buildup in Syria of a “Russian expeditionary force” to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, first appeared last month (August) in Israeli and Ukrainian online publications. The Kremlin denied these accounts, but seemingly halfheartedly (Kommersant, September 8). On September 4, speaking... MORE

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili presented his government’s newly appointed minister of foreign affairs, Giorgi Kvirikashvili, at the annual gathering of Georgian diplomats, in Tbilisi. Until September 1, Kvirikashvili headed the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development (Civil Georgia, September 1). The appointment evoked a... MORE

Throughout the year, the Middle East has remained engulfed in conflict as well as intense international diplomatic negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. And just as the United States and other powers are grappling with the threats posed by the violence in the Middle... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected Ukraine’s offer of constitutional status for the Donetsk-Luhansk territory as unacceptable. Addressing an international economic forum in Vladivostok, on his way back from China today (September 4), Putin dismissed Kyiv’s offer as inadequate in content; unilateral, instead of being... MORE

Following the 2002 Bali bombings, Indonesia confronted a seemingly unmanageable terrorist problem. Over the next decade, however, the country became widely viewed as a counter-terrorism success story as the threat from al-Qaeda-linked or -inspired jihadist groups declined dramatically. Unfortunately, the transnational pull of the conflicts... MORE

By August 2015, at least 70 individuals from Finland had travelled to Syria and Iraq (Suomen Uutiset, July 30). [1] According to an Interior Ministry report from August 2014, the vast majority intended to join “radical opposition groups” operating in the conflict zone. [2] The... MORE

On September 3, China held a military parade commemorating the end of World War II (WWII). A departure from previous parades, which only took place on China’s October 1 National Day, this parade had a significant international focus, featuring troops from 17 countries, veterans of... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. On August 24, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called together a unique meeting, in Berlin, of the “Normandy” format minus Russia (though essentially in consensus with Moscow). Merkel, along with French President François Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko,... MORE

An overall consensus, in broad outline, seems to have taken shape among the main European players, pre-eminently Moscow and Berlin, to accelerate a solution to the conflict “in” Ukraine by the end of this year, on Russia’s terms. German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted a meeting... MORE