While US assistance for Georgia’s defense remains frozen, Moscow is ignoring objections to its own arms deliveries to Russia’s friends. Most recently in Washington, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov brushed aside US Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ objections to Russia’s delivery of Bastion coastal artillery systems,... MORE

Visiting Washington on September 15-17, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov asked for the US to consider military equipment sales to Russia. Conversely, Serdyukov announced despite US objections that Russia would sell state-of-the-art anti-ship missiles to Syria. And in line with Russian policy, he warned against... MORE

On the morning of July 22 at approximately 5 A.M., Special Forces of the Mauritanian and French armies commenced operations against an alleged al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) base in northern Mali designed to free French hostage Michel Germaneau, 78-year old dependent on medicinal... MORE

Turkey hosted the tenth summit of Turkic-speaking countries in Istanbul on September 16. The Istanbul summit, bringing together Turkish, Kazakh, Azeri, Kyrgyz and Turkmen leaders, took steps towards furthering institutionalizing this inter-governmental platform, in line with the conclusions of the previous meeting in Nakhchivan in... MORE

The Ukrainian government is stepping up its own efforts to discourage Gazprom’s South Stream project. Overestimating Russia’s capacity to implement it, Kyiv fears that Moscow would shift the gas transit to Europe into South Stream, bypassing Ukraine via the Black Sea, and devaluing Ukraine’s own... MORE

Since the reform of the Russian conventional armed forces began in late 2008, Moscow has proved cautious, even reluctant, to enter defense assistance agreements with NATO member states that would support its modernization drive. To date, the underlying message has been clear: this is a... MORE

On September 14 in Baku, the heads of state endorsed the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector (AGRI), a project to import natural gas from Azerbaijan to Romania and onward to Hungary. The project involves the liquefaction of gas for shipment by tankers across the Black Sea from Georgia... MORE

On September 15 in Murmansk, the Russian and Norwegian foreign affairs ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Jonas Gahr Store, signed a bilateral treaty on delimitation of maritime jurisdictions and cooperation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Jens... MORE

London-based Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakaev was arrested today (September 17) in Poland, where he had traveled to attend the World Congress of the Chechen People taking place in Warsaw on September 16-18. A Polish police spokesman told Reuters that Zakaev, who was granted political... MORE

“CORF [Collective Operational Reaction forces] will be no worse than NATO,” claimed Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, only one year ago. Today, these words are used in Russia to popularize the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the CORF within the post-Soviet space. They are also... MORE