At the end of each winter training cycle, the Russian Armed Forces typically hold extensive readiness checks in the month of April. So unsurprisingly, on April 6, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the Russian military would carry out 4,048 such snap exercises at 101... MORE

Turkey’s plan to build a canal bypassing the Bosporus Strait and potentially upsetting the Montreux Convention (see EDM, February 9) along with Russia’s movement of warships from the Caspian to the Sea of Azov via the Volga–Don Canal in order to threaten Ukraine (see EDM,... MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be holding no cards in the event of a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy is known to believe that he holds the card of his personal charm and the moral card, but those do not count with... MORE

In a recent column published by RIA Novosti, the deputy chairperson of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, writes that Russia’s relations with the United States have reverted back to a full “Cold War” (RIA Novosti, April 23). Medvedev served as Russia’s caretaker president from... MORE

The next meeting of the Intergovernmental Council of the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) will be held in the central Russian city of Kazan, on April 29–30 (TASS, March 17). A key agenda item for the EEU member states may reportedly be to discuss the... MORE

Military tensions along the Russian-Ukrainian border reached a near-boiling point in recent weeks. During March–April, Moscow amassed as many as 110,000 troops and 56 permanent-readiness battalion tactical groups (BTG) close to eastern Ukrainian territory, according to the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) of... MORE

Russia is downscaling its buildup of military forces in Ukraine’s vicinity after three weeks of an elaborate war scare. The Russian pullback under way since April 22, however, is neither complete nor irreversible: a repeat buildup of forces around Ukraine is anticipated for September with... MORE

Two important and connected developments in the second half of April—military exercises in Crimea (RIA Novosti, April 22) and the wider growing tensions with Ukraine—cogently reiterated the military-political importance to Russia of this illegally annexed peninsula. Since 2014, Moscow has been heavily investing in building... MORE

Russia’s long-serving minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, announced last week (April 22) that the Russian forces massed around Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders would withdraw between April 23 and May 1 (TASS, April 22; see EDM, April 22). Moscow had dubiously asserted that this massive... MORE

Many observers are treating Russia’s pullback of land forces from the Ukrainian border as the end of the crisis—even some of those experts who acknowledge the Kremlin has not given up its aggressive posturing against Ukraine (Voennoe Obozrenie, April 25). Yet that belligerent stance may... MORE