As the modernization of Russia’s military inventory continues, with its primary focus remaining on upgrading the nuclear triad, Moscow has adopted a fairly predictable strategy for the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), partly rooted in mounting “modern” technology on older refurbished naval platforms. This especially relates... MORE

The Russian Armed Forces are continuing their covert offensive operations in Ukraine, even as Moscow denies direct involvement. The use of sophisticated types of modern military equipment, however, clearly hints at who is behind the registered attacks. Indeed, the recently observed deployment of electronic warfare... MORE

On February 28, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the Northern Fleet (NF) created an additional Air Defense (Voyska Protivovozdushnoy—PVO) division, ensuring that, “the Northern Sea Route [NSR] is now under steady protection.” He noted that protection of the east–west NSR, which follows Russia’s... MORE

President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, met for an emergency summit in Moscow on March 5, in a last-ditch attempt to defuse the confrontation in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. Syrian opposition fighters and Turkish forces in Idlib are fighting... MORE

Russia has a long track record of importuning the United States and its allies regarding arms control treaties and negotiations. But the sentiment Moscow presents to the West is far from altruistic. Indeed, having largely completed its nuclear modernization and reached the limit of what... MORE

A critical feature in the transformation of Russia’s Armed Forces since the political leadership introduced the reform and modernization efforts in late 2008 has been the extent to which older analogue systems of military communications have been digitized. This complements wider efforts to adopt and... MORE

On February 17, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) disrupted the activity of a network of “bot farms”—an extensive, organized effort to create “fake” (automated) social media accounts, which was found to be active across multiple regions of Ukraine. According to the SSU, the technical... MORE

President Vladimir Putin likes to talk about Moscow’s plans to create new super “weapons of the future” and to show videos of how they will work (Moskovsky Komsomolets, February 23, 2020; see EDM, March 1, 8, 2018 and February 21, 26, 2019), but neither Russia’s... MORE

Russian officials and the pro-Kremlin press have been praising the successful offensive against Idlib by troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The northwestern Syrian province is the last stronghold of the anti-al-Assad opposition. All other such opposition-held areas across Syria have already been overrun... MORE

In Russian-occupied Crimea, people are praying with Christian Orthodox priests for rain and snow because the last six months passed by with virtually no precipitation. Because of the dry winter, local reservoirs are now almost empty. Journalists forecast apocalyptic drought scenarios for the peninsula. And... MORE