Articles

Are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary up to the task of deterring Russian aggression in NATO's Eastern Flank?

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. June 2026 Issue.

History shows that Russia rarely changes its behavior out of goodwill. But it has repeatedly changed its calculations when confronted with sufficiently strong and persistent pressure.

American strategy in the South Caucasus and greater Eurasia must look beyond traditional infrastructure. Investing in ports and railways is no longer enough. The US must also invest in secure telecom networks, cloud storage, cybersecurity, digital governance, online finance, and artificial intelligence.

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. May 2026 Issue.

Any long-term U.S. strategy toward Tehran must recognize that the stakes extend well beyond the Arab world or the Persian Gulf. They also encompass the geopolitical future of the South Caucasus and the broader contest over power, influence, and connectivity across Eurasia.

A sharp analysis of how Russia’s Victory Day parade has evolved from a symbol of historical remembrance into a tool of ideological control and geopolitical messaging under Vladimir Putin. Ambassador Eitvydas Bajarūnas examines how the Kremlin’s growing reliance on World War II mythology reveals both the strengths and deepening insecurities of the Russian regime amid the war against Ukraine.

Latin America has become a central arena of technological and geopolitical competition between China, Russia, and the United States. China has dramatically expanded its influence through trade, infrastructure, telecom networks, and digital technologies, while Russia has pursued a more limited strategy focused on military cooperation, information operations, and authoritarian partnerships.

Is it possible for Russia and China to establish a joint base in the Arctic?

Russian social media influencer Viktoria Bonya’s unexpected appeal to Vladimir Putin revealed a new form of discontent emerging not from opposition circles, but from Russia’s apolitical mass audience.

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. April 2026 Issue.

In recent years, Russia has most often been viewed through the prism of the war in Ukraine. That is understandable, but this limited view of Russia can obscure important things happening there. The global noise contributes to this as well: US domestic politics, the increasingly transactional stance of Donald Trump, changes in Europe, rising tensions in the Middle East, and so on. All of this overshadows one essential question: What is actually happening inside Russia itself?

Why the West has Strategic Stakes in Restoring Georgian Democracy.

Russia’s and Ukraine’s battles in the Black Sea following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine will intrigue military historians for decades as they marked a major change in naval warfare.

Russia’s military planners probably want their counterparts in NATO countries to believe that Moscow is building significant ground force capacity in the Arctic both to deter attacks and to have more conventional military options in the event of war. 

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. March 2026 Issue.

The US National Security Strategy, released in December 2025, contains around 10,000 words but none of them are “Arctic.” The strategy also omits references to similar words like polar or what NATO typically refers to as the High North. Nevertheless, it is increasingly difficult to engage with national security and defense professionals today when worries about threats and challenges emanating from the Arctic do not feature prominently.

The Strait of Hormuz is virtually closed. Tanker traffic has slowed sharply, vessels are pooling on both sides, and war risk insurance has become the binding constraint for physical trade. This is where a geopolitical story meets a market mechanics story.

What makes Vladimir Putin tick? Many Russian analysts focus on what he is going to do next, what his health is like, and who would seize power if he were incapacitated. Others opine about Putin’s desire for peace or war, the war crimes he committed during the occupation of Ukraine, or how he gets along with President Donald Trump.

If war sustains legitimacy, what would peace mean for the regime? This article examines how Russia’s internal resilience architecture shapes its strategic behavior, and where its vulnerabilities lie.

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. February 2026 Issue.

In this article the author writes about the experience of Russia's war in Ukraine from her personal perspective. The views expressed in this article are author’s own.

It is undeniable that the defense industries of most European states have seen rapid growth and development over the past four years. These changes are most evident in the states bordering Russia and Belarus—the Baltic states, Poland, and Finland. However, despite a shared history and geopolitical challenges since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these states have pursued very different approaches to defense policy.

In attempting to persuade the United States to support Russia’s objectives in Ukraine, lift sanctions, and rebuild a bilateral relationship, Moscow is enticing the Trump administration with the lure of untapped resources of the Russian Arctic. 

The Western Balkans’ geographical proximity to Ukraine, coupled with its cost-effective labor force and existing logistics networks, positions the region as an ideal manufacturing hub for the Ukrainian war effort.

Your monthly overview of major recent developments in Russian politics, economy, and society. January 2026 Issue.

President Donald Trump and his acolytes have argued that the US needs to absorb the island of Greenland for its raw materials, to ensure US security, and to prevent aggressive powers like China and Russia from taking it first.

Breaking Russia’s kill chain requires making escalation ineffective rather than trying to manage it or wait it out. The aim is to ensure that each step of a hybrid campaign, up to and including controlled military escalation, produces strategic losses for Moscow instead of gains. This is where resilience and all domain defense become operational concepts that directly deny the Kremlin’s expectation that pressure and blackmail will eventually pay off.

As investments and technology continue to pour into deep processing gas, Uzbekistan is increasingly poised to be a regional leader in production capabilities. Watching how Tashkent navigates these challenges will reveal clues about the country’s direction for years to come.

On November 12, 2021, a group of Turkic states that had been meeting regularly for 30 years reorganized itself into the Organization of Turkic States (OTS). Three months later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Despite the momentum gained at the end of 2025 in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, driven by President Donald Trump, there is no sign of a compromise acceptable to both sides.

Donald Trump and those around him are drunk on the elixir of American military power; it is only a matter of time before they plunge the US - and the world - into a catastrophe.

It came as no surprise last month to learn that the Russian Federation was luring able-bodied Africans to come, fight, and die at the front in Ukraine. Duped by promises of training and professional advancement, young Africans grab for the few available life rafts, even when chimerical.

When a flock of Shaheds crossed the border into Poland on Sept. 10, 2025, NATO forces had two choices. The first was to send up NATO-supplied F-16 fighters armed with $500,000 apiece Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. The second was to ignore the Russian drones and pretend nothing was wrong — the choice that Romania made in response to a similar Russian incursion days later.

By the end of 2025, it became clear that the Trump administration is prepared to sacrifice both Ukraine and Transatlanticism to the quest for better ties with Moscow.  President Trump’s recent interview with Politico and the administration’s National Security Strategy espouse a view of a Europe where leaders are weak, societies are decadent and at risk of “civilizational erasure,” and values must be resisted by Washington along with far-right European parties.

The second Trump administration has rapidly upended US–EU economic relations, replacing decades of low tariffs and open investment with sweeping protectionism driven by President Trump’s long-standing zero-sum, mercantilist worldview. Although Europe initially hoped for negotiated, reciprocal liberalization, it instead accepted a highly unbalanced arrangement largely because its dependence on US security guarantees constrained its ability to retaliate.

Lithuania passed the test posed by the first Trump administration with flying colors. At a time when most European allies were rattled by the president’s brusque style and criticisms of European free-riding, Lithuania more than doubled its defense spending between President Trump’s election in 2016 and his departure from office in 2021.

Autumn is fading to winter in Ukraine’s east. The battle lines with Russia are soon to freeze over, though Russia is squeezing out some last-minute victories in key fortress cities. The situation leaves Ukraine tallying the results of the past year. Despite critical hits to the Russian economy, Ukraine’s situation is only bleaker.

Mali’s junta has been caught on the back foot by the al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) and by public opinion in the capital, Bamako, leading to a growing chorus of reports that Bamako might fall. Amongst a host of concerns, this outcome would mean that al-Qaeda would take de facto control of a key Sahelian state and could increase the pressure on Mali’s neighbors, Niger and Burkina Faso, to succumb as well.

A withdrawal of American troops from Romania at a critical time in negotiations on Ukraine would be a serious mistake. Russia would take it as the U.S. giving it a free hand to act in the Black Sea, region which would increase tensions and the risk of escalation.

The United States and Russia have fundamentally different models of how the world works. If this remains to be the case, Russia will continue to be a problem for the US – if not an outright threat – and the US will be the same for Russia.

Georgia is becoming a test case for whether US security assistance can be made responsive to both strategic and democratic concerns.

For Russia and China, beneath the surface of the diplomatic pleasantries, joint military exercises, and staged leadership summits lie deep incompatibilities and increasingly widening contradictions in several domains- territorial, geopolitical, economic, technological, and military. These historical fractures and grievances challenge the sustainability of their alliance while revealing their underlying rivalry.

US policy toward the wars in Europe and the Middle East could make war crimes and nuclear blackmail more common, to the detriment of US national security and global stability.