Russia

This Brief explores the sphere in which Russia’s state-controlled irregular armed groups operate, focusing in particular on the notorious Wagner Group and their impact on violent conflicts.

Brussels put together an exceptionally hard sanctions package in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This Brief evaluates their effectiveness and concludes that while sanctions are taking time to produce effects, their impact will be long-lasting and hard to reverse.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its eighth month, this Brief explores the impact of the war on the countries of the eastern neighbourhood, where it has had significant economic, demographic and geopolitical repercussions.

This Brief presents an overview of EU sanctions policy, the rationales guiding their imposition and the expected impacts, focusing on the two types of situations in which the EU usually applies its measures: violent conflict and democratic backsliding.

With Belarus now playing an active enabling role in the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, this Brief analyses how military cooperation between Russia and Belarus has deepened since 2020.

This Brief analyses to what extent the Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement of November 2020 has created the basis for a lasting settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh. The deployment of Russian troops in the region may lead to a new ‘freezing’ of the conflict resolution process, instead...

Russia's grand aspirational objective is to bring back what is deemed in Moscow to be a more natural state of play for the Balkans: multipolarity. But what is the Russian modus operandi in the region? Is it confined only to coercion, as the headlines suggest, or is there a softer...