Azerbaijan has begun importing gas from Russia under a deal which should enable Baku to meet its own domestic demand but which raises serious questions over its recent agreement to boost exports to Europe.  Russia’s state gas producer and exporter Gazprom announced on November 18 that it had begun supplying gas to …

While symbolic and non-binding, the decision by the European Parliament (EP) to formally recognise Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism is a significant development since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began back in February. Given foreign policy remains a core competency of the 27 individual EU member states, national parliaments would …

On 21 October 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilisation” of up to 3,00,000 military reservists, aged 18 to 50 in the Russian armed forces, to fight on the Ukrainian front. This marked the first such mobilisation since the Second World War. Notably, this development was preceded by …

In January 2022, as Russian troops were massing on Ukraine’s border, the U.S. government withdrew support for the EastMed natural gas pipeline, claiming the project conflicted with the environmental goals of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, and created tensions in the region. The pipeline, set to be completed by 2025, was a €6 …

The protests across Iran are continuing as the Iran revolution 2022 campaign against the mullahs’ regime expands to more cities throughout the country. On Saturday when Iranian regime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei held a session with members of the regime’s Basij, a paramilitary force affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), college students …

The war in Ukraine has confirmed the validity of some European countries’ approach to Russia and their own defence. Poland can now feel vindicated in its longstanding distrust of Russia, as well as its insistence on the crucial role of the United States for European security. Meanwhile, Germany’s pre-2022 hope to convert …

The Turkish ministry of defense claims to have killed 471 Kurdish militants in 271 separate attacks in Syria and Iraq since the start of the operation The Turkish Minister of Defense, Hulusi Akar, visited the Turkish troops on the border with Iraq on 27 November to inspect the ongoing operations …

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on 26 November that large reinforcements of US military troops and equipment made their way into northern and eastern Syria, coming in from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) through the illegal Al-Waleed border crossing.

Colonel Davoud Jafari, a senior official of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Division, was assassinated in Syria on 22 November. The IRGC claimed that Israel was responsible for the attack.

The US Department of Defense has, for the fifth straight year, failed to pass a financial audit, with only seven out of the Pentagon’s 27 military agencies receiving a passing grade. “We failed to get an ‘A’,” Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, told reporters last week, …