Fidan’s remarks came a few days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised question marks over his country’s pending ratification of the Sweden’s accession to NATO. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Wednesday that his country remains committed to understandings it reached with NATO and Sweden over Stockholm’s membership …

In the absence of foreign investors, lucrative assets in Russia can be given for safekeeping to anyone who is “one of us.” Those people will owe their wealth to Putin personally, making them directly dependent on the Kremlin to preserve that wealth. Russia’s elites are unhappy about many things, not …

The way in which Prigozhin was apparently killed suggests the Kremlin wanted to show how it deals with traitors. Whatever really happened, the Russian elite will see the air crash as retribution for Wagner’s armed uprising. “They got him in the end.” This was a common reaction to the news …