On March 18, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad landed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a whistle-stop tour involving meetings with numerous high-ranking Emirati government officials (Arab News, March 18). Among others, al-Assad met with UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum before being... MORE

Jama’at al-Ansar al-Muslimeen fi Bilad al-Sudan (Ansaru) is a Nigerian jihadist group affiliated with al-Qaeda that operates in northwestern Nigeria. The group was formed between November 2011 and January 2012 by Boko Haram defectors and with the approval of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).... MORE

Al-Qaeda’s Malian Affiliate Targets Russia’s Wagner Group Jacob Zenn On April 25, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Mali, Group for Supporters of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), claimed that it kidnapped Russian Wagner Group “soldiers” in Segou (Twitter/@Lesoirdebamako, April 26). This occurred despite the fact that the... MORE

Azerbaijan intends to contribute to Europe’s energy security by developing into a regional “green” energy hub, the government officially announced on May 9, at The World Utilities Congress, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Minenergy.gov.az, May 9). In line with such goals, several days earlier,... MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strongly advocates for an embargo on Russian oil imports to the European Union: “Now the priority is the oil embargo. No matter how hard Moscow tries to disrupt this decision…” (President.gov.ua, May 15). His economic advisor Oleg Ustenko has further admonished... MORE

Tensions between Moscow and the Circassians, both within Russia and abroad, have reached a boiling point. The driving factors are numerous and multi-varied. In part, they stem from long-time Circassian efforts to promote their national language and identity, to return Circassians living abroad back to... 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

Russia’s unprovoked war of conquest against Ukraine, launched on February 24, is being fought on multiple fronts. Beyond the conflict’s conventional military aspect and the information war, Russia has now been found to be unlawfully seizing Ukraine’s agricultural goods and machinery. According to Ukrainian officials,... 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