*Click here to read Part One. The Ukrainian army’s liberation campaign in Kherson region has ground to a halt. This should not be surprising as the army is insufficiently equipped with heavy long-range artillery, tanks and helicopters. Hopes that the Ukrainian army would advance and... MORE

Russia designates its all-out aggression in Ukraine as a “special military operation,” avoiding the term “war.” Nevertheless, the Kremlin has imposed a “state of war” (voyennoye polozhenie) in the Russian-occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine. This decision caps the declaration of a... MORE

Moscow has long been upset by Kyiv’s efforts to reach out to non-Russian nations inside the Russian Federation and enlist them as allies in its fight against the Kremlin. But steps taken by Ukrainian leaders in the past few weeks, a time of heightened concern... MORE

While German politics remained relatively stable under former Chancellor Angela Merkel and we may observe a certain level of continuity under her successor, Olaf Scholz, Polish politics have undergone a profound change since 2015, when the United Right (Law and Justice) took charge. This shift... MORE

When it comes to industrial mobilization in Russia, it is necessary to underline a critical component: the degree of integration between military and civilian production. During World War I, 80 percent of military products were produced by civilian enterprises in Russia; by 1941, the share... MORE

On September 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the decree on the “partial mobilization” of Russian citizens (TASS, September 21). This decree caused mixed reactions across Russian society, despite the almost total public support for Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine. Indeed, rampant dissatisfaction has been widely... MORE

Since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the peninsula has developed two completely different worlds. The first is the occupation administration itself, which was established by Russia right after annexation. Primarily, efforts were directed at “reawakening” the Russian identity within the Eastern Slavs of... MORE

The latest summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, held on September 15 and 16, made numerous headlines in the international media (see EDM, September 19). Analysts watched two main summit developments most closely: how far its participants would go in asserting... MORE

General Secretary Xi Jinping has scored an overwhelming victory at the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and the First Plenum of the new Central Committee. Xi’s picks for the Politburo and its Standing Committee consist of unalloyed supporters, but these officials are also largely apparatchiks... MORE

Since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine on February 24, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) have not been able to demonstrate success, despite the huge modernization and rearmament efforts of the previous 12 years. The main causes here are not the mistakes of a... MORE