Russia

Yevgeny Prigozhin is presumed dead in a plane crash, alongside Wagner Group’s co-founder and operational commander, Dmitry Utkin. They leave behind a business empire and thousands of security contractors in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Kremlin has...

  Introduction The security situation in Europe has changed dramatically following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear weapons if the conflict were to escalate. The Foreign Policy Research Institute convened a Track...

On July 7, 2023, at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, operators carefully placed an M55 rocket filled with nerve agent onto a machine that drained and neutralized the deadly material. America destroyed its last chemical weapon—the final...

Editor’s Note: The head of Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is presumed dead as a result of a plane crash on August 23. Below, FPRI experts examine what the controversial mercenary boss’s death means for Russia, Putin, and the war...

In 2018, Yale scholar Timothy Snyder called Russian information operations in the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, “the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare.” Likewise, recent advances of Russian disinformation in Africa have resulted in some...

  Download PDF Introduction  I arrived in Kyiv this July after a thirteen-hour overnight train ride in a clean but austere Soviet-era railway car. Since I couldn’t purchase a return ticket in Poland, immediately upon arrival at the train...

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has embarked upon an ambitious endeavor: containing its two most powerful rivals, China and Russia, at the same time. Central to this strategy is the imperative of...

On July 26, a military junta seized power in Niger. The junta arrested the democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum and suspended the constitution. A few hours later thousands of Nigeriens, with Russian and Nigerien flags, took the streets to...

Most analysts have labeled Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion and the Wagner Group mutiny a failure. And in many ways, that’s true. Indeed, Prigozhin and the contingent of Wagner fighters that eschewed signing contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defence...

Twice this week, drones attacked a building housing government ministries in Moscow. The Kremlin immediately blamed Ukraine. Ukrainian officials remained coy, not directly claiming responsibility for the strikes but noting that Moscow “is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged...