From January 21 through February 14, Russian and proxy forces killed 13 Ukrainian soldiers and wounded at least another 19 along the frontline in Ukraine’s Donbas. Most of these casualties were inflicted by snipers, some of whom were apparently deployed from Russia’s interior for a... MORE

Azerbaijan’s victory in the Second Karabakh War (September 29–November 9) has had a transformative effect on the country. It not only changed the attitudes of its population, whose members now feel themselves to be heroes rather than victims (see EDM, January 21), but also bolstered... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Post-Communist Romania’s first national warship-building program—a multi-role corvette— resides in legal limbo since being launched in November 2016, with none of the four planned vessels having been laid yet. After an initial attempt by the authorities to directly... MORE

Introduction The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is attempting to reinvigorate lagging unit training and military education reforms to enable an integrated joint operations capability. A training conference, training mobilization order for 2021 and a regulation reinforcing the “Triad” (“三位一体,” sanwei yiti) joint education reform represent... MORE

Reporting on the saga of Chinese efforts to purchase Ukraine’s strategic Motor Sich aerospace production company frequently casts Kyiv as a weak “pawn” on the geopolitical chessboard, caught in the middle of the larger rivalry between Beijing and Washington. Yet Ukraine is pursuing its own... MORE

In most parts of the world, the lines on maps separating countries are true borders. That is, they are controlled by the governments on one or both sides. But in some places, they remain the quasi-open frontiers they were in the past or have reemerged... MORE

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, visited Moscow in person last week (February 5)—still highly unusual during the continuing global COVID-19 pandemic. Borell’s face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, initially aimed at finding ways to reverse the... MORE

In November 2016, the Romanian government decided to begin the first national warship-building program since the fall of Communism in 1989. More than four years have passed since this decision was been made, but no ships have been laid yet. The program for building four... MORE

At the end of last year, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (June 2014–May 2019) announced in an interview that, back in 2018, he had initiated a special operation to detain mercenaries belonging to the notorious Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner Group (News.ru, December 31,... MORE

The 1936 Montreux Convention governs the passage of ships between the Mediterranean and Black seas via the Turkish Straits, dictates the size of the vessels that can remain there, as well as limits how long they are allowed to stay. Now, 85 years later, this... MORE