Black Sea

Russia and Ukraine have spent the last four years locked in a conflict with many fronts, from the battlefields of Donbas to the servers of Ukrainian businesses. This paper will examine one under-studied front: the dispute between Russia and...

In August 2015, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense officially launched a comprehensive effort to overhaul the country’s armed forces as conflict razed through the country’s Donbas region. Three years later, fighting capabilities have reached their highest levels since independence...

This spring, Georgia marked—with understandable pride—the centennial of the first democratic republic founded on May 26, 1918. This brief, but shining, moment in the nation’s history, the beginning of a three-year period between its occupation by Czarist Russia and...

Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the President the power to negotiate alliances with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”  Presidents made limited use of that power in the first century and a half of...

In November 2017, the European Union Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit in Brussels culminated in the signing of the Comprehensive and Enlarged Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between the EU and Armenia. The CEPA ended a four-year limbo that emerged after Armenia...

The Black Sea region in recent years has been marked both by sharp shifts and by intractable dilemmas. The biggest shift is Russia, which has expanded its military role throughout the broader Black Sea region even as it stumbles...

The previous article, The Post-Soviet Wars: Part I, advanced a causal explanation for the post-Soviet wars, the wars that broke out in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To...

By some measures, Eurasia’s energy landscape has changed more in the past several years than in the previous several decades. The price of oil remains at half its level of four years ago and shows no sign of rising....

It is an honor to have been invited to present the twenty-first Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. It is humbling to be part of a series that has included scholars whose...