In the spacious, though somewhat faded and dimly lit lavishness of the Soviet-built official air terminal of Vnukovo-2, on the afternoon of December 6, President Vladimir Putin met for two hours with his French counterpart, Francois Hollande. This previously unannounced meeting was, according to the... MORE

The conflict that arose after Russia’s temporary ban on imports from 23 Belarusian meat processors and on Belarusian food transit to Kazakhstan (see EDM, December 3) has not been resolved yet. During the first week of December, Belarusian officials at all levels of government expressed... MORE

The “Putinian Pax Energetica”—Russia’s strategic use of energy exports and pipeline politics to influence countries in its neighborhood—is faltering, and Italy now appears to be taking countermeasures to deal with it. On December 1, during a state visit to Turkey, Russian President Vladimir Putin finally... MORE

The Kremlin has a lot to explain following the dangerous deterioration of Russia’s international situation and the drastic degradation of its economy. And President Vladimir Putin opted in his annual address to the Federal Assembly, delivered last Thursday (see EDM, December 4) to provide one... MORE

Since the fall of 2014, Tashkent has been boosting diplomatic engagement with its neighbors (see Part One in EDM, October 3). In particular, Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov met with President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan in Dushanbe on September 11 (press-service.uz September 13, 2014), and visited... MORE

Taiwan’s largest election ever, on November 29, led to a rousing, if not expected, defeat of Taiwan’s governing and pro-status quo party, the Kuomintang (KMT), by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), dealing a crushing blow to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s administration. Moreover, the election... MORE

Chinese intelligence operations have long been understood in the West as somehow different than more familiar forms of espionage: inscrutable, undirected and largely run by amateurs. Like most modern states, China, however, has entrusted intelligence to professional organizations. This second installment on China’s espionage against... MORE

Even for a country that is notable for its myriad contradictions, the gap between China’s hard and soft power has never been more pronounced. The year 2014 has witnessed the kind of global hard-power projection that is unprecedented in recent Chinese history. The two-year-old Xi... MORE

During the last three years, the Houthi movement has accomplished a remarkable transformation, evolving from an obscure family-led Zaydi Shi’a guerrilla movement in Sa’ada governorate, one of Yemen’s most remote and underdeveloped, to become the country’s dominant military and political force. During the last six... MORE

On November 27, the Kenyan government reopened four mosques in Mombasa, which it had shut down the previous week over fears that they were involved in the radicalization and recruitment of local youth for Somalia’s Islamist militant group, al-Shabaab. The reopened mosques were handed over... MORE