The massive strategic-operational war game Vostok 2018, held last September in the Russian Far East, officially involved up to 300,000 personnel and thousands of tanks and other heavy military equipment. Russian forces were joined by a mechanized brigade from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).... MORE

Today’s (October 17) news of a tragic attack on a school in the Crimean coastal city of Kerch (UNIAN, October 17) snapped global attention back to this Russian-occupied corner of Ukraine, which itself borders on a precarious security situation in the Kerch Strait and Azov... MORE

The heavy casualties suffered in early 2018 in Syria by the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company (PMC) working for the Kremlin, turned international experts’ attention to these groups and other irregular forces as tools of Moscow’s non-linear military operations and its commercialization of... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a surprise official visit to Azerbaijan, on September 27. The formal reason for his arrival was to hold talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev as well as to jointly attend the Ninth Interregional Russia-Azerbaijan Forum (Kremlin.ru, September 27; AzerNews, September... MORE

On September 6, Russian military correspondent Semen Pegov posted information on his Telegram-channel WarGonzo (WG) about “members of one Russian Private Military Company [PMC] being currently deployed in Yemen.” He ascribed this information to data received from “three anonymous sources in the siloviki [security services... MORE

President Vladimir Putin visited New Delhi last week (October 4–5) with a large posse of top businessmen and ministers to promote trade and large arms contracts. India has been a major Russian (Soviet) ally since gaining independence from the United Kingdom and a major consumer... MORE

On September 25–27, the Ministry of Defense Industry of Azerbaijan (MoDIAR) hosted the defense-industry exhibition ADEX-2018 in Baku, where leading defense companies from European and Asian countries showcased their latest military products (Mod.gov.az, September 25). ADEX turned out to be a useful platform to promote... MORE

In early October, following the loss of an Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea on September 17—which Moscow blamed on Israel—Russia carried out a high-profile additional deployment of the S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) (see EDM, September 27,... MORE

As the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and the People’s Liberation Army Naval Aviation (PLAN Aviation) prepare for more challenging missions and continue to integrate more advanced aviation platforms into their inventory, their need for talented and experienced pilots and aviators is increasing. To... MORE

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not wait long to deliver its promised S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Syria. On the night of October 3, a huge An-124 Ruslan transport plane unloaded four mobile launchers, radars and command vehicles at Russia’s local Khmeimim airbase. This demonstrative... MORE