Russian President Vladimir Putin held a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on June 24, the Kremlin press service said. The situation involving Azerbaijan and Armenia was a central topic.

The remaining issues are border demarcation between the two former Soviet countries. As well as the issue of re-establishing a trade and transit corridor via Armenia between the rest of Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan exclave.

Georgia has effectively abandoned its efforts to advance on the membership issue. True, the work on cooperation and various partnership packages, in itself important, continues. But the membership issue itself has been put on the back burner.

With over 90 percent of the vote counted, the 46-year-old journalist and writer’s Civil Contract party held an insurmountable lead of 54-21 percent over the “Armenia” bloc headed by 67-year-old ex-President Robert Kocharyan – a far more overwhelming result than expected.

There are enormous ramifications. There is a real chance no effective or, at best, a weak government could emerge. Though Azerbaijan got back most of its occupied territories, the formal delimitation of the border with Armenia would take a solid government in Yerevan with a mandate to do so. It might be impossible to put a finality to the 30-year war or open trade routes in the absence of one

How the self-styled “Asian Geneva” successfully navigated among Russia, China, and the West—at least for now, Iskander Akylbayev and Brian Y.S. Wong write in Foreign Policy magazine.

Putin has said nothing about any new incursion more than seven years after Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula and Moscow proxies took over large chunks of eastern Ukraine – 14,000 people have died in the ensuing conflict.

The project was launched in the aftermath of last year’s unprecedented mass protests which clearly jolted Lukashenko after his disputed re-election to a sixth term and the widespread, and often brutal, use of security forces and the courts to crush dissent.