Russian military strategists argue that modern wars are decided in the high-intensity initial period; and the multi-pronged large-scale offensive into Ukraine was indeed launched, on February 24, 2022, with the aim of achieving a decisive success in the first couple of weeks. Yet as the... MORE

Bilateral relations with Russia remain of crucial importance to Armenia, given the small South Caucasus country’s difficult security predicament. Yet these considerations extend beyond hard military factors. Russia monopolizes Armenia’s energy supply, exemplified, in particular, by Gazprom’s direct ownership of the Armenian pipeline and natural... MORE

Russian journalists, pundits and government officials who support the Kremlin’s aggressive war against Ukraine are regular guests on Italy’s political talk shows. To justify their presence, Italian television hosts usually say they want to give people a different point of view on the conflict (Secolo d'Italia,... MORE

In recent years, relations between Ukraine and Hungary were repeatedly overshadowed by bilateral conflicts and mutual accusations. The primary stumbling block to this day continues to be one of Ukraine’s western provinces—Transcarpathia (Zakarpatska Oblast). For example, earlier this month, the secretary of the Ukrainian National... MORE

Three months into Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine, the role of Russian military reconnaissance and communications satellites remains noticeably underdeveloped. Although Moscow has 102 military satellites in orbit, the efficiency of its battlefield reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, and command-and-control systems still seems to be... MORE

At dawn on Thursday (May 19), an ethanol plant in the Russian village of Tyotkino, in Kursk Oblast, near the Ukrainian border, came under artillery fire for the second day in a row. One person died in the attack (TASS, May 19). On Wednesday, the... MORE

In the seemingly deadlocked but, in fact, fast-evolving war in Ukraine, two impactful events coincided in mid-May, altering the course of the battles and political stand-off. The first one was the end of the months-long resistance of Mariupol, as the last defenders of the city’s... MORE

On July 17, the Russian-occupied Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia will hold a referendum on joining Russia (Radio Tavisupleba, May, 13). Anatoly Bibilov, who is serving out his term as the head of the separatist regime in Tskhinvali, signed a decree to hold the... MORE

The ninth online poll of 823 urban-based and internet-using Belarusians, conducted by Chatham House during April 8–18 (Svaboda.org, May 6), showed that roughly one-third of respondents support Russia’s war and about the same fraction is against it, whereas 57 percent are afraid Belarus may be... MORE

At an April 26 meeting in the Kremlin with United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, President Vladimir Putin again defended the “independence” of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s Donbas. In referring to these puppet formations, backed near-exclusively by Russia’s military and financial... MORE