It is not fashionable, these days, to downplay China’s interest in the Arctic. Recent news that Beijing plans to publish a guidebook on Arctic shipping, that China will receive preferential treatment along the Northern Sea Route (NSR), or that Chinese investors plan to finance Russian... MORE

The shape of any political settlement will depend on whether Russian troops and paramilitary personnel with their weaponry are evacuated from what is legally Ukraine’s territory, or remain deployed there. Point 9 of the September 20 memorandum is unfulfillable as formulated (and it is hard... MORE

On September 20 in Minsk, negotiators from Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—which together constitute the Tripartite Contact Group—as well as the Russia-installed Donetsk and Luhansk leaders finalized an agreement on the main elements of an armistice in the ongoing... MORE

On September 11, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) annual summit (Ozodi, September 11). On the sidelines of the summit, Rouhani took advantage of his first trip to the small Central Asian republic to ink ten... MORE

On September 11, an apparently frustrated Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili announced that his visit to the United States to attend and address the annual session of the United Nations in New York City was deliberately thwarted by Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili and his office.... MORE

Alyaksandr Lukashenka has somewhat softened his rhetoric about the supposed crucial role of the United States in sparking the Ukrainian crisis (see EDM, September 9). On September 9, during his visit to the Minsk Industrial Leather Association, he said that “the root causes of the... MORE

The tragic battles around Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively known as the Donbas region) have taken a pause, and as civilians try to rebuild a semblance of normal life, leaders are figuring out how to now move forward. In his first 100 days, Ukrainian President Petro... MORE

On September 10, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a bill on sanctions against Russia (president.gov.ua, September 10). The law was published in official newspapers on September 11, which gave Poroshenko legal grounds to, as soon as September 12, slap sanctions on Russia for... MORE

While on a several-day visit to the Russian Far East (see Jamestown Blog on Russia and Eurasia, September 9), Russian President Vladimir Putin spent less than six hours in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on September 3. He took this trip amidst the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and... MORE

On the eve of a new round of anti-Russian sanctions unveiled by the European Union on September 9, Gazprom’s CEO, Alexei Miller, kicked off a two-day visit to Kyrgyzstan. The head of the Russian natural gas giant and Vladimir Putin’s close advisor had previously visited... MORE