Section: The Jamestown Foundation (USA)
NATO Aspirant Georgia Still Defenseless After All These Years
It was a summit of modest expectations and modest results for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Warsaw on July 8–9. These results are of an interim nature: building-blocks for further decisions at upcoming ministerial meetings, not waiting until the next summit. The Warsaw results do not, as yet, correlate with the growth in...
Putin and Erdoğan Prepare for a Decisive Russo-Turkish Summit
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will make his first foreign trip after the unsuccessful military coup to St. Petersburg to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on August 9. In the aftermath of the July 15 coup attempt, thousands of Turkish soldiers, police officers, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and academicians have been...
Georgia May Become a Key Destination for North Caucasians if EU Grants It Visa-Free Entry
Migration from the North Caucasus, specifically from Chechnya, to Europe has increased this year. In the first six months of 2016, the number of migrants from Russia to Germany rose two-fold compared to the same period in 2015, and over 80 percent of those migrants came from Chechnya. Nearly 5,300 Russian citizens applied for political asylum in...
NATO-Georgia: The Open Door Policy’s Failing Test (Part Two)
*To read Part One, please click here. It was a summit of modest expectations and modest results for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Warsaw on July 8–9. These results are of an interim nature: building-blocks for further decisions at upcoming ministerial meetings, not waiting until next summit. The Warsaw results do not, as yet,...
Moscow Seeks to Put Ukraine’s Smallest Nationalities in Play Against Kyiv
The ethnic-Ukrainian share of Ukraine’s population is now greater than the ethnic-Russian share of the Russian Federation’s population—and significantly larger if one does not include Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas in the Ukrainian estimation. Despite that, Moscow continues to try to play the ethnic card in Ukraine, not only with...
From Syria With Love—Colonel-General Aleksandr Dvornikov Takes Over Russia’s Southern Military District
The operation in Syria is Russia’s first experience of expeditionary warfare—beyond what Moscow calls its “near abroad”—since Soviet forces left Afghanistan in 1989. The ongoing campaign in Syria, along with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, have highlighted Russian military capabilities that were absent during the war with Georgia...
Militarization of the Caspian Sea: A Zero-Sum Game?
On July 13, in the capital city of Astana, Kazakhstan hosted a meeting of the foreign ministers of the five Caspian littoral states. The officials gathered to discuss a draft convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea and other issues related to multilateral cooperation in the region (APA, July 13). Such negotiations have now gone on for...
Russia’s Economy Deteriorates as Putin Focuses on Squabbles Among Siloviki
President Vladimir Putin is not taking a summer vacation. He has instead maintained a busy schedule of meetings with government officials and regional governors. But his grip on the steering wheel of Russia’s foreign and domestic policy is far from steady. The heavily censored Russian TV footage still portrays him as strong and confident,...
NATO Can Refloat Romania’s Black Sea Naval Initiative (Part Three)
It was a summit of modest expectations and modest results for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Warsaw on July 8–9. These results are of an interim nature: building blocks for further decisions at upcoming ministerial meetings, not waiting until the next summit. The Warsaw results do not, as yet, correlate with the growth in...
Olympic Doping Scandal Overshadows Massive Infrastructural Overhaul of Downtown Moscow
The doping scandal, which may exclude Russian athletes from this summer’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics, is dominating the political news in Moscow at the moment. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) executive board has called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban all Russian athletes from the Olympics after the publication of a...
