Russia and Eastern Europe

In a telephone conversation with the Ukrainian President, the European Council President Charles Michel expressed the EU's continued support for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders. Michel reiterated his call on Russia to respect the OSCE principles and commitments on the transparency of military movements.

With Armenia's snap parliamentary elections coming up in June, a lot of actors are looking at the country's domestic politics, but no one more closely than Moscow. In this op-ed, originally published on KarabakhSpace.eu, Benyamin Poghosyan looks at what the presence of the former Armenian president, Robert Kocharyan, means for Pashinyan and Armenian-Russian relations.

Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky visited Istanbul over the weekend for talks with the Turkish president Recip Tayip Erdogan. Erdogan told the media after the talks that Turkey strongly defended Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” stressing, “We reaffirmed our principled stance of not recognizing the [Russian] annexation of Crimea.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin has appointed retired Vice Admiral Sergei Menyailo as the interim head of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania. Menyailo was the first governor of Sevastopol following its annexation by Russia and served as Plenipotentiary of the President of the Russian Federation in Siberia.

Gazprom intends to build an LNG plant with an annual capacity of 1.5 mln tonnes near the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok, and another facility on the Black Sea coast, which will have a production capacity ranging between 500,000 and 1.5 mln tonnes. Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East are top priority regions for Gazprom in the long term.

Russia's biggest naval ship and only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has been embroiled in a corruption scandal at the Murmansk shipyard where it currently is being repaired and overhauled. The ship is often used by Russia for power projection in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has wrapped up his tour of three Gulf countries after meeting his counterparts in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. In various press appearances with his local counterparts Lavrov appeared upbeat on the future of relations between Russia and the Gulf countries, but there was not much detail as to how this can happen in substance.