Eurasia

Emily Holland, Eurasia Program Director This year’s NATO Summit in Ankara was less about substance than Trump centered theatrical spectacle, but the central message on Russia and Ukraine is consequential. Over the course of less than two days, President...

Back in February 2025, when US Vice President JD Vance announced at the Munich Security Conference that US assistance would be scaled back and called on Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security, many European leaders reacted...

The following analysis was originally published on Two Marines, a newsletter on Russia’s war in Ukraine, defense technology, and modern warfare, on June 5, 2026.  One of the Russian military’s most important developments in 2024-2025 was the establishment of the...

Executive Summary Russia’s war against Ukraine has precipitated a large-scale structural decline for the Kremlin across economic, military, and geopolitical dimensions. Domestically, its war-driven economy is consistently strained by rising fiscal pressure, inflation, and structural imbalances linked to continuous...

Executive Summary A small group of Russian nationalists has been calling to “reclaim” Russia’s colonial territories since the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991. After the Kremlin finally acted on these aspirations by invading parts of Ukraine, the number...

As many in Central and Eastern Europe were emerging from the buoyant aftermath of Hungary’s mid-April 2026 elections, less than 500 miles southeast of Budapest another consequential national plebiscite transpired. On April 19, a mere week after the watershed...

Introduction For much of the post–Cold War period, Central Asia was framed as a space of Sino-Russian coordination, institutionalized through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and underwritten by a tacit division of labor: Russia provided security, and China delivered...

 Introduction Kyrgyzstan was once viewed as the “island of democracy “in Central Asia. That changed in the last five years due to the tandem of President Sadyr Japarov and head of the State Committee for National Security (GKNB) Kamchybek...

As the dust settles and the euphoria ebbs on the historic mid-April 2026 elections in Hungary, the consequences of Tisza’s resounding victory over Victor Orban’s Fidesz party will start to manifest to the north of Budapest, specifically in Poland,...

The following analysis was originally published on Two Marines, a newsletter on Russia’s war in Ukraine, defense technology, and modern warfare, on April 3, 2026.  During 2025, the Russian military continued to experiment with improving its employment of uncrewed...