Since being inaugurated in 2001, Turkey’s annual hosting of its "Anatolian Eagle" aerial military exercises at Konya air base in the central Anatolian region of Konya have been central to its efforts to preserve military preparedness and to enhance relations with the air forces of... MORE

At the Chuzhou City national security leading group meeting last December, local officials appeared to overshadow municipal Ministry of State Security (MSS) officers despite the subject of the meeting—an Anhui State Security Department directive (Chuzhou City Web Portal, December 31, 2010). This event casts doubt... MORE

China's defense-industrial complex is emerging from the shadows of its troubled past. While weaknesses and limitations in the Chinese defense industry remain, in recent years it has produced a wide range of advanced weapon systems that has markedly enhanced the country’s military capabilities and demonstrated... MORE

The second week of January 2011 saw little let-up in apparent insurgency-related violence in the North Caucasus, with the largest number of reports coming out of Dagestan. On January 13, two men attacked a police unit in Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala, killing one policeman and wounding... MORE

In 2010, rights activists in the North Caucasus continued to come under strong pressure from the Russian government. Most notoriously, in September 2010, Chechnya’s ruler Ramzan Kadyrov filed a libel case against head of the Memorial human rights center, Oleg Orlov. Following the killing of... MORE

The ruling United Russia faction has revealed in the Duma the amendments it will attach to the new START III arms control treaty. The ratification draft will contain several points that mimic two US Senate non-binding resolutions approved together with the ratified treaty, requiring the... MORE

As WikiLeaks exposed details concerning “Eagle Guardian,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was concluding the first such state visit to Poland in eight years. For most of that period relations between Warsaw and Moscow had progressively worsened. But over the last year dramatic improvements have occurred,... MORE

By the end of 2010, the Russian government’s policy toward the North Caucasus unexpectedly received perhaps the strongest setback right on the Moscow streets. On December 11, 2010 a crowd of Russian nationalists estimated to be 5,000 people staged riots near the Kremlin, shouting such... MORE

For more than a month the media was full of accounts of the latest revelations from WikiLeaks broadcasting US diplomatic cables to the world. The international speculation about the ramifications of the world reading US classified diplomatic traffic gave birth to a media frenzy and... MORE

The modernization of the Russian armed forces, as currently planned for the next decade, appears to squeeze resources for re-equipping the Ground Forces.  An article in the defense ministry’s official publication, Krasnaya Zvezda, unsurprisingly confirmed that modernizing the strategic nuclear arsenal will take the lions’... MORE