At this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that transporting Russian natural gas via the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) is technically possible but that Azerbaijan has never received an official proposal for such... MORE

Over the past few months, diplomatic activism around the Libyan civil war has intensified sharply. Two dynamics drove this process. First, the visible presence of Russian mercenaries fighting alongside the forces of Khalifa Haftar, the eastern-based leader of the Libyan National Army (literal Arabic translation... MORE

At a summit in Istanbul, on January 8, 2020—an event officially earmarked to celebrate the beginning of exploitation of the TurkStream natural gas pipeline—Russian President Vladimir Putin and his host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sat down together to work out ceasefire agreements regarding Libya... MORE

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi was Moscow’s ally in the Cold War against the West, and consequently it acquired many billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet weapons. In more recent years, President Vladimir Putin, the Russian Armed Forces and... MORE

In a grand ceremony in Istanbul, on January 9, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, officially opened the TurkStream natural gas pipeline, running from Russia to Turkey along the Black Sea seabed (TRT World, January 9, 2020). The pipeline is... MORE

Philippines Lifts Martial Law Amid Fragile Gains Brian M. Perkins On January 1, the government lifted martial law on the embattled Philippines island of Mindanao, which has long been plagued by Islamic State (IS)-linked violence and has grappled with a communist rebellion by the New... MORE

The Moldovan government, controlled by pro-Russian President Igor Dodon, is starting the new year with major economic concerns. A key agenda for officials is to ensure Dodon’s victory in the presidential elections, to be conducted at the end of 2020. To achieve this goal, the... MORE

On November 12, the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) apprehended al-Bara al-Shishani, a leader of the Russian-speaking faction of Islamic State (IS). Al-Bara was arrested in a private house located in the region surrounding Kyiv. According to SBU officials, al-Bara had been residing in Ukraine since... MORE

Russia has long counted on its geographic location between the Asia-Pacific region and Europe to cement its relationship with China. However, Beijing increasingly views Russia as merely a supplier of raw materials (Svobodnaya Pressa, April 27)—a view reinforced anew on Monday (December 2), by the... MORE

On November 7, at 3:30 A.M., a westbound train from Xi’an, China, for the first time ever used Istanbul’s $4 billion Marmaray sub-Bosporus railway tunnel to dispatch goods to central Europe (Haber.sol.org.tr, November 7). The train’s voyage represents another of China’s attempts to shave time... MORE