The six month long civil war in Libya and the NATO air campaign to oust Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has created division within the ruling class in Moscow and aggravated anti-Western and anti-American sentiment. Last March President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly clashed... MORE

President Dmitry Medvedev’s think-tank, the Institute for Contemporary Development (INSOR), has worked out proposals for reorganizing the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to raise its effectiveness and expand its role. The proposed changes would accelerate decision-making procedures in the CSTO; establish a right of... MORE

Turkey has announced various measures, in an effort to punish Israel for its failure to meet its demands for the Mavi Marmara incident last year, in which nine Turkish citizens were killed by Israeli soldiers. Ankara’s decision came on the eve of the announcement of... MORE

On September 2, a small demonstration took place in front of the Iranian embassy in Baku. The event, organized by the Baku branch of the World Azerbaijani Congress, focused on the ecological problems of Urmiyya Lake in Iran and the related demonstrations by thousands of... MORE

Presidents Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, and Emomali Rakhmon of Tajikistan held a quadripartite meeting on September 2 in Dushanbe. The presidents gave preliminary consideration to possible security and cooperation arrangements for the region, in anticipation of... MORE

On August 24, the head of Kazakhstan’s national nuclear monopoly Kazatomprom announced plans to increase its uranium fuel pellet shipments to China by one hundredfold,  from 2 metric tons this year to 200 metric tons in 2013 or 2014 (Bloomberg, August 22). This is welcome... MORE

On June 29, 2011, for the first time in a decade, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force (PLAAF) J-11 crossed the center line of the Taiwan Strait in an attempted intercept of a U.S. Air Force (USAF) U-2 reconnaissance aircraft conducting a monitoring mission... MORE

The world caught a rare glimpse of Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s five-day visit to China last month. Xi is due to succeed Hu Jintao as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at its 18th Congress in... MORE

In mid-July, Taiwan published the 2011 edition of its defense white paper (“National Defense Report”). This was actually the third such document released in the last 38 months—the Ministry of National Defense (MND) having published a white paper in the final days of the Chen... MORE

Since December 2010, the Belarusian leadership has abandoned any pretences of support for a democratic society, pursuing its internal enemies with unprecedented determination. At the same time, under pressure as a result of some internal unrest and economic difficulties, it has tried to exploit the... MORE