India and Pakistan have gained accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) a regional security agreement that originally started between Russia and China. The SCO conference took place after the BRICs meeting in Ufa. The SCO includes Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and has been actively courting expansion for a long…

On his way to the BRICS conference in Moscow, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a pit stop in Astana, signing 5 agreements with President Nursultan Nazarbayev ranging from defense and terrorism to arranging for the transfer of uranium reserves from Kazakhstan to India. This is the first complete tour of the five post-Soviet “republics”…

As the P5+1 powers and Iran edge closer and closer to a nuclear accord, global oil markets have begun speculating as to how the flow of hydrocarbons will be affected and when sanctions will be released on Iran, which holds the world’s second largest reserves of oil and is additionally among the top 10 richest…

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko unveiled several changes to the Constitution to Parliament on July 1, and has since been barraged by criticism and outright rejection from belligerent separatists still occupying vast swathes of the eastern part of the country. The changes largely amount to a decrease in overall presidential authority, granting local towns the significant…

The IMF’s Deputy Managing Director David Lipton gave a statement on default risks and creditor relationships that suggests the organization will continue to support Ukraine even if it decides to follow through on the threat of last month’s legislation allowing it to ignore payments to creditors like the consortium of institutional investors like Franklin Templeton…

The Russian Presidency is allocating an enormous amount of “secret” funds for a military buildup, the largest since the end of the Cold War. The federal budget that is black, or authorized but not itemized, has doubled since 2010 to 3.2 trillion rubles (or $60 billion) according to estimates by a Bloomberg affiliate. Putin may…

In a move that adds further murkiness to an already confused situation, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have agreed to a demarcation of their maritime border in the Caspian Sea, despite the fact that previous conferences of the five Caspian littoral states (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia) established that borders had to be delineated and agreed…

Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran in charge of its nuclear negotiations Abbas Araqchi said that it has agreed to the major concession of allowing UN inspectors to have managed access to military facilities as part of its nuclear deal with the P5+1 Powers. The UN team would apparently be allowed to take environmental samples from…