On January 21, 2022, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach attended a talk in New Delhi, India, organized by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. Schönbach was speaking as the chief of Germany’s navy during his visit to the institute. “What he really wants is respect,” Schönbach said, referring …

Turkey is increasingly relying on airpower in its fight against the PKK. New parties have been drawn into the conflict as it spreads to new theatres in Iraq and Syria, which, for now at least, complicates potential efforts to settle things down. Early February brought a fresh demonstration of the …

United States’ expertise at holding strategic command over controlling operation of diplomatic reins may well be assumed to have fumbled a little at propagation of so-called Ukraine-crisis because of alleged military designs of Russia. Yes, to a considerable degree, greater part of the world still depends on going by what …

At an extraordinary press conference Friday afternoon, US President Joe Biden declared that he was “convinced” Russian President Vladimir Putin had made “the decision to invade” Ukraine and advance on the country’s capital Kiev. Biden said that the White House “expected” such a move “within the coming week, within the …

Military veteran Zdravko Ponos, an opposition candidate for president in an election in April, tells BIRN that Serbia will struggle to recover from five more years of Aleksandar Vucic. As a candidate for Serbia’s highest office, Zdravko Ponos could hardly have a better biography: a highly-educated military man, former head …

Hungary’s flirtation with the Russian president did not start with Orban, but it is the current premier who has turned it into an unequal marriage. How did a politician who launched his career on the back of anti-Russian slogans end up becoming Putin’s main ally in the EU? In June …

The defining characteristic of Albania’s brutal communist regime was its morbid fixation with borders – and the memory of that claustrophobic world helps explains why, today, so many Albanians want to escape. Icrossed Albania’s borders on a cold day of January 1991, for the first time of my life. It …

More than two dozen Serbian women remain trapped in refugee camps in Syria, waiting so far in vain to be repatriated by the Serbian state. Whispered messages via banned mobile phones provide a chilling glimpse of their day-to-day plight.

In a dramatic spectacle on February 15, the Russian State Duma adopted a nonbinding resolution urging President Vladimir Putin to recognize the separatist-claimed parts of eastern Ukraine as independent states. Coming amid international alarm bells about the major concentration of Russian military forces along the border with Ukraine and in …

During the last decade researchers on Ukrainian politics have been noting the increasing activity of the right and ultra-right political forces and the boost in their popularity. It is worth noting that the left flank in Ukrainian political life was totally suppressed by the Ukrainian nationalists. Rhetoric of some political …