Anatoly Nesmiyan, who blogs under the screen name “El Murid,” says that Putin is putting in place “a mechanism for conducting permanent war since his regime cannot exist in a peaceful form” and must find enemies in order to justify the kind of rule the Kremlin leader prefers in Russia. …

Switzerland has been hosting discreet meetings between officials of Kosovo and Serbia in an effort to defuse tensions in the Balkan region. A stand-off has developed in northern Kosovo with its Serbian neighbours as an incident over car number plates has escalated. Members of the local Kosovar police force resigned …

Since the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries in the South Caucasus, have been in conflict. Sometimes this conflict has been “frozen,” while at others it has been “hot” — for example, during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 when 44 days of intense fighting left thousands dead on …