The next major battle between Russian aggressors and Ukrainian defenders may take place not in Donbas but on the waters of the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait, a development that could prove even more dangerous to regional stability than earlier Russian acts of... MORE

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin informed President Vladimir Putin, on April 24, that the country’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) is finally able to finance itself without state support. Rogozin called this “a huge achievement that opens up the prospect for commercialization of other... MORE

Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Curtis Scaparrotti, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), met in Baku on April 19 to discuss several issues related to military posture and exercises. The two... MORE

Investigative reporting by the veteran liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta has found that the Russian state security services, in particular the Federal Security Service (FSB), may be misreporting and inflating the number of terrorist acts that it annually foils. The paper noted that, in most reported... MORE

This past April, Russian media announced that the Admiral Kuznetsov, the country’s only aircraft carrier, will be out of service, undergoing repairs and modernization, until 2021. The Ministry of Defense signed a contract worth approximately $1 billion with the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation for rather... MORE

The protest movement in Armenia, which forced former president and recently appointed prime minister Serzh Sargsyan to resign on April 23 (see EDM, April 23, 24, May 3), has been particularly remarkable for the fact that, unlike during preceding mass street protests, this time Armenia’s law enforcement... MORE

Buoyed by their role helping to defeat Islamic State (IS), a number of the most prominent groups from among the more than 60 that make up Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have come together under the banner of the al-Fateh coalition to contest this month’s... MORE

Boko Haram’s international connections have long been a subject of scholarly and analytical inquiry. While the group’s communications since 2009 with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Algeria and, to a lesser extent, al-Shabaab in Somalia—and with Islamic State (IS) in North Africa and... MORE

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) represents an interesting case study in counterterrorism, having suffered no jihadist attacks, despite being a stated target for Islamist extremists. The UAE considers its implementation of both so-called “hard” and “soft” strategies to tackle potential security threats as the key... MORE

Libya: Haftar’s Brief Absence Exposes LNA Divisions Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan National Army (LNA) chief, has returned home, ending rumors that he had been incapacitated by ill health and was dying in a Paris hospital. Since returning to Libya, he has redoubled his campaign against... MORE