China, the world's largest crude importer, was non-committal about its intentions to release oil from its reserves as requestedby the United States, while OPEC producers were not considering changing tactics in light of the U.S. action, according to three sources in the group.

• November 24, 2021

By Benyamin Poghosyan, PhD, Chairman, Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies

The developments of the last year proved that assessments according to which by taking some 8500 square km of territories in the 2020 Karabakh war, Azerbaijan will be satisfied and an era of peaceful development will be launched for Armenians, were highly exaggerated, and had little semblance to reality.
Since the end of the 2020 Karabakh war, Armenia has faced a new, harsh reality along its borders with Azerbaijan. Some in Armenia hoped that after taking back most of the territories which Baku lost during the first Karabakh war of 1992-1994, an era of regional peace would start in the South Caucasus, while Azerbaijan would agree to continue negotiations to fix the status of Nagorno Karabakh within its 1988 borders. Baku was quite quick to dampen such perceptions. Azerbaijan established an economic region of Karabakh in July 2021 and started to aggressively push forward the narrative that war had ended not only the conflict, but Nagorno Karabakh itself, and thus it was senseless to negotiate over the status of a non-existing entity. READ MORE

• November 24, 2021

By Yeghia TASHJIAN, Beirut-based regional analyst and researcher, columnist, "The Armenian Weekly”

“Co-opetition” was a term coined by Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff to describe a paradoxical strategy of cooperation among competitors, enabling them to collectively achieve mutual gains. It’s a relatively new term in international relations and used occasionally in international trade. Nevertheless, I will be using co-opetition to explain the current status of Russian-Turkish relations.
In foreign policymaking and geopolitical self-perception, Russia and Turkey resemble each other in many ways. Throughout the course of events in the Middle East and South Caucasus, as the West failed to engage with regional developments to resolve conflicts, other regional states such as Iran, Turkey and Russia filled the political vacuum. Hence, the Turkish-Russian interaction in the Middle East and beyond has been partially facilitated by the military and political withdrawal of the US and the European Union’s absence from the region. READ MORE

• November 24, 2021

The suspension of the approval process for the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline by a German regulator could be short-lived as Europe is hungry for more gas, an analyst said on Monday after meeting officials of Russian state gas giant Gazprom

• November 22, 2021

Russia has sent Lebanon the satellite images it has for Beirut's port before and after a huge explosion rocked it last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with his Lebanese counterpart in Moscow on Monday.

• November 22, 2021

Consumers in the European Union and Britain face further gas price spikes this winter as flows of Russian gas via major transit routes are proving too little, too late.

• November 22, 2021

A German regulator's decision to suspend licensing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany could delay commissioning of the infrastructure until March next year, government sources told Reuters.

• November 17, 2021

Russia said on Wednesday it would deploy a new paratroop regiment on annexed Crimea by the beginning of December and complained about a British deal to boost Ukraine's navy which it said showed British military activities were expanding near its borders.

• November 17, 2021