Paul A. Goble

Azerbaijan’s victory in the Second Karabakh War (September 29–November 9) has had a transformative effect on the country. It not only changed the attitudes of its population, whose members now feel themselves to be heroes rather than victims (see EDM, January 21), but also bolstered the diplomatic weight and possibilities of the Azerbaijani government in its…

Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions (see EDM, February 18). The European Union has labeled the project “E40,” and the United States has signaled its support. And were the E40 waterway to be…

Three factors have come together to explain Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s renewal of older Russian plans for the reconstruction of a highway from Chechnya into Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge.

No one familiar with the travails of the victims of tsarist and Soviet oppression will have forgotten the name of perhaps the most notorious political prison outside of Moscow, Vladimir Central, through whose cells passed thousands of prisoners on their way to exile, the GULAG and all too often death.

The EU is now in a deep crisis, one that is the product not only of Britain’s vote to leave it but also of the organization’s “inability to stand up to the global economic crisis, Russian military-political and information expansion, international terrorism and uncontrolled mass migration,” according to Aleksandr Voronin.

Staunton, November 25 – The shooting down of a Russian military plane by Turkish forces after Kremlin ignored repeated warnings from Ankara not to violate Turkey’s airspace not only increases the risks of a clash between Russia and the West but has serious consequences for Putin at home, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and…

The Islamic State is shifting its primary recruiting efforts away from the Arab world to the Caucasus, Central Asia and Indonesia, regions where the number of young Muslims is growing and the local situations are in its view more favorable to its message, according to a new report by Egypt’s Administration for Religious Regulations.

On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler explained to his entourage why he thought he could get away with mass murder by saying that “nobody talks about the Armenians nowadays,” despite the fact that they had been the victims of a mass murder only 24 years earlier.

Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, it was said, might have failed at everything else, but at least he kept the trains running on time. Now, it appears that Vladimir Putin isn’t capable of doing that and his all-too-public wrestling with the problem is generating concerns among Russians about his ability to govern the country.

Just as the purpose of terror is to terrorize, the purpose of provocation is to provoke – and if the targets of a provocation understand what the one engaging in it wants to provoke, they will be in a much better position not only to prepare for it but to avoid falling into the trap…