May 25:
Ukraine's most famous prisoner of war has returned home. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko has been freed from prison in Russia after almost two years behind bars. Savchenko, who was shot down over Eastern Ukraine in 2014, taken to Russia thereafter, and subsequently put on trial for the deaths of two Russian journalists, was "exchanged for two Russians convicted of fighting alongside pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine," the news agency confirms.
May 27:
The Kremlin is tightening its grip on the Internet in Russia. According to the independent Rain TV channel, Russia's Ministry of Communications has formulated a draft law that would put the entirety of the infrastructure of the Russian Internet under state control. The bill "says that the state will regulate all critical elements of the 'Runet' structure" - namely, "the national domains .ru and .rf, Internet traffic nodes, autonomous systems [and] government information networks essential to the stability of the system."
Russia is making significant strides in space technology, with potentially major adverse consequences for American security. May 25th marked the second successful test launch of the "Nudol," an anti-satellite missile that is said to be capable of taking out U.S. GPS systems, and that development has raised concerns among U.S. military officials. "Russia views U.S. dependency on space as an exploitable vulnerability, and they are taking deliberate actions to strengthen their counter-space capabilities," the Washington Free Beacon reports Air Force Lt. Gen. David J. Buck as telling a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. While experts remain unsure of how the "Nudol" could be employed in the event of a conflict between the United States and Russia, the development has led to revived calls for new investments in U.S. counter-space capabilities.
Europe and the United States are still standing firm on sanctions against Russia, at least for the moment. TheEU Observer reports that the latest summit of the G7 group of nations in Japan has yielded a renewed commitment to economic and political pressure against Russia over its policies in Ukraine. The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, the U.S. and Japan noted that existing penalties that have been levied against Moscow were designed to compel the Kremlin to withdraw its forces from Ukrainian territory and abide by the so-called Minsk peace plan, and "can be rolled back when Russia meets these commitments." If Russia does not, they warned, the United States and Europe "stand ready to take further restrictive measures in order to increase the cost on Russia should its actions so require."
May 29:
The Obama administration's decision to activate a new missile defense base in Romania earlier this month has drawn the Kremlin's ire, with Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening "strong countermeasures" in response to the move. But at least one of those countermeasures is in jeopardy, and the culprit is Minsk.Eurasianet reports that the government of Alexandr Lukashenko in Belarus is dragging its feet on a Russian proposal to deploy Iskander-M missiles on its territory, despite prior promises from Belarusian officials to their Russian counterparts that they would take "appropriate countermeasures together."
Minsk's hesitance appears to have everything to do Lukashenko's own strategic calculations. According to Belarusian military analyst Siarhei Bohdan, these include two principal considerations: "for one, the presence of Russian troops in Belarus could be used to interfere in Belarus's internal affairs; and secondly, Belarus's strategic position of guarding Russia's western flank is a bargaining chip that it would lose if it were to allow Russians to defend that flank themselves."