On the night of January 21, ethnic Russians and ethnic Armenians clashed in the city of Mineralnye Vody in Stavropol region. Mikhail Grigoryan, a 23-year-old ethnic Armenian, stabbed to death Dmitry Sidorenko, a 29-year-old ethnic Russian and member of the Russian armed forces. The suspect... MORE

A new phase of Russia’s war is ongoing since mid-January in Ukraine’s east. This phase has broken the informal “silence regime” that had taken effect since December 9, which had mainly restrained the use of heavy artillery and multiple missile launchers. It is on these... MORE

Russia has achieved much success last week in its rush toward self-isolation, and perhaps the most demonstrative step was made in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Sergei Naryshkin, the Chairman of the State Duma, came to Strasbourg as the head of... MORE

As the investigation into the January 12 murder of the Avetisyan family (see EDM, January 16) continues, several top Armenian officials have admitted that the Russian side’s refusal to hand over Valery Permyakov, Russian soldier who is the main suspect in the case, contradicts existing... MORE

Russia has finally become concerned about its nationals fighting in Syria against its ally, Bashar al-Assad, and has begun targeting fighters returning from abroad. The authorities’ actions sometimes take an outrageous turn, such as when they recently accused men who had been in Egypt on... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a cheating game with the West and Ukraine, not only hollowing out the Minsk armistice agreements (see EDM, January 22, 23, 27), but even shifting the agreed-upon demarcation line on the ground and on the map. Kyiv is alert... MORE

The Minsk ceasefire agreements, signed last September by the representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Moscow-backed rebels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), were designed to stop the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and create a semblance of a... MORE

On December 28, 2014, authorities in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny, Tatarstan, detained Tatar rights activist Rafis Kashapov upon his return from Turkey, where he had reportedly received medical treatment and held meetings with local activists. The authorities ordered the activist detained for two months... MORE

It is tempting to slip into a spiral of sensationalism when describing the concurrent trends in Belarus’s foreign relations and national aspirations, even though—if history is any guide—these trends may be reversed as abruptly as they started. So far, however, tensions have been on the... MORE

Analysts at the Russian Institute for Strategic Research (RISI), a Moscow-based think tank that pushed hard for Russia to invade Ukraine (Nr2.com.ua, January 13), are now urging Moscow to overthrow Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Until 2009, RISI was officially connected to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service... MORE