The South Caucasus poses a serious problem for Russia. However, like all neighboring countries, with the exception of Belarus. Only with Minsk are relations fundamental and reliable. Everything else is highly problematic.
It’s all about the lack of a clear strategy. Over the past 30 years, Russia has been moving simultaneously in three directions:
Since the Soviet days, Russia has tried to sell the story that the country is a “family of nations.” President Vladimir Putin still tires to export this narrative, as shown when an indigenous Tuvan musician represented Russia during a performance at the recent G20 summit in India. But this multicultural image does not reflect the reality faced by Russia’s ethnic minorities at home.
Syria has not only failed to become a secure base for Russian forces in the Middle East, but is increasingly generating its own crises.
For several years, Russia has set itself the joint mission with Iran of pushing the United States out of Syria—and ideally out of the entire Middle East. Yet Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent growing alignment with Tehran have actually had the opposite effect: the U.S. presence in the region is growing.
Bulent Kenes, a Turkish journalist who was editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman, was arrested in October 2015 for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison for criticizing the president on Twitter. In 2016, an arrest warrant released by Erdogan regime for Kenes along with 46 other prominent journalists and writers, who were caught in a wave of repressions when Erdogan arrested about 100,000 people (including hundreds of journalists) ostensibly linked to the military that had been plotting a coup. Turkey and President Erdogan personally seek Kenes’ extradition from Sweden, where he has been living for the past 6,5 years. In a meeting with the Swedish prime minister, Erdogan presented giving up the journalist as a condition for Ankara’s ratification of Sweden’s NATO membership.
A month after Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash, Russian authorities are attempting to assert control over the parallel military structure.
“Prigozhin is alive.” The phrase remains among the most popular queries in Russia’s Yandex search engine a month after the crash of the Embraer Legacy jet on Aug. 23 that killed Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the removal of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov on September 3 in what was the biggest change among the country’s political leaders since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than eighteen months ago. Reznikov’s departure comes following weeks of speculation over allegations of financial improprieties at the Ministry of Defense, and reflects Ukraine’s desire to demonstrate a zero tolerance approach toward allegations of corruption.
Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire in the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. Before 2014 Ukraine was a home of some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent of those who declared themselves as the Ukrainians. Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or Belarus as “foreign” but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].
The slow rate of [Ukrainian] progress has also prompted politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to question whether it is worth continuing to support Ukraine’s military effort or instead concentrate their efforts on negotiating a peace settlement between the warring countries.
The apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin from the crash of his private jet between Moscow and St. Petersburg represents an inflection point in Russia-Africa relations. Prigozhin, leader of the notorious Wagner Group, was the point man for Russia in Africa since Wagner first began operations on the continent in 2017. Its leaders have been sanctioned by 30 countries for the group’s destabilizing activities.
The war in Ukraine has spurred the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. According to EU border and coastguard agency Frontex, by the end of 2022, 15 million Ukrainian citizens had fled to Europe since the beginning of the war, with roughly 3 million choosing to stay.