The Somali pirates have once again warned that they could kill the crew of the Chinese flagged merchant vessel De Xin Hai if a military action is launched to rescue them.  Speaking from the ship by phone, a pirate cautioned, “We know [the Chinese] have... MORE

December 11 marked the anniversary of the beginning of the first Chechen War. It was then, in December 1994, that President Boris Yeltsin decided to militarily force the Chechen people to abandon the idea of independence. As is known, the Russian army lost that war... MORE

A suicide car bomber attacked a police checkpoint in Nazran, Ingushetia, yesterday (December 17), wounding 23 people –10 internal troops, three members of the patrol-sentry service of Ingushetia’s interior minister and 10 civilians, including three children. Law enforcement sources were quoted today as saying that... MORE

The recent Bulava launch failure has implications for US-Russian arms control talks (EDM, December 17) and will determine whether the Russian defense industry is capable of delivering advanced weapons systems at qualitative levels competing with analogous systems produced abroad. The issue involves the quality of... MORE

Three public figures were attacked in Bishkek in the past week. On December 9, former president Askar Akayev’s aide Bolot Januzakov was severely beaten. On the same day Aleksander Knyazev professor of the Kyrgyz-Slavic University, who often criticizes the current regime for usurping power, was... MORE

US-Russian nuclear arms reduction negotiators seem close to concluding a follow up strategic arms reduction treaty (START). The Russian press reports that Washington has agreed to serious concessions and that the new START treaty will be signed soon. The new verification measures will be less... MORE

The year 2009 will likely be remembered as the beginning of a more assertive phase in Chinese foreign policy, as seen in Beijing's stance on reform of the international financial system, its massive investments in foreign countries, and in particular its investment in and acquisition... MORE

China and Pakistan have forged a formidable partnership in high-tech defense production. This partnership is born of their ever-deepening military and strategic cooperation that is also reflective of the burgeoning capacity of China's defense industries and the budding Sino-Pakistani defense relationship. The epitome of this... MORE

In early December, the People’s Liberation Army's (PLA) publication, China Defense Daily (Zhongguo Guofang Bao), published a report that provided a rare glimpse into an underground tunnel that is being built by the Second Artillery Corps (SAC)—the PLA's strategic missile forces—in the mountainous regions of... MORE

On December 12, the brother of the murdered Ingush opposition figure Maksharip Aushev, Mussa, stated that the investigation of the murder had made no evident progress since he was killed on October 25. That is despite the fact that Ingushetia’s President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Russian... MORE