YEREVAN, Armenia—Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s bid to consolidate his new government’s power paid off on Sunday, when his Civil Contract party won an overwhelming majority in early parliamentary elections that Pashinian had called last month. Civil Contract took 70 percent of the vote, while two moderate opposition parties cleared the 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. The outcome legitimizes Pashinian’s position seven months after coming to power, and dealt a knockout blow to the former ruling Republican Party, which finished with just 4.7 percent of the vote. Pashinian, a former opposition leader, led a wave of popular protests earlier [...]
In the South Caucasus state of Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, who was backed by the ruling Georgian Dream party, won a bitterly contested presidential runoff last week against Grigol Vashadze, who was supported by the opposition United National Movement. Zurabishvili’s 16-point margin of victory was unexpectedly wide given her razor-thin lead in the first round of voting held in October, and the election process was marred by accusations of electoral irregularities and an unlevel playing field. In an interview with WPR, Paul Stronski, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discusses the [...]
As NATO has focused its attention on Russia’s offensive military capabilities in Eastern Europe, an equally significant and, in practice, more problematic issue has been largely ignored: Russia’s preponderance of “anti-access, area-denial” capabilities in the borderlands between the Baltic and Black Seas. Is NATO focusing on the wrong Russian threat in Eastern Europe? This week, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Announced by President Donald Trump last weekend, the move comes after repeated Russian violations [...]
