This was the most significant Western arms sale to Russia and its postponement - the exact terms of the suspension of the deal are not clear - marks a very visible rebuff to Moscow on the eve of Nato's Wales Summit. The Mistral assault ships can carry up to 16 heavy helicopters, land troops and armoured vehicles. Their delivery would have resulted in a marked improvement in Russia's amphibious capability.

NATO formally opened its liaison office in Uzbekistan on Friday, a year after it started working and amid heightened Russian rhetoric about the western alliance encroaching on its backyard. Uzbekistan is unmistakably taking a different path than that of its neighbors. While Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are all (to varying degrees) participating in Russia's economic and military integration schemes, Uzbekistan has resisted.

The conflict in Ukraine came up during the Russian Foreign Minister’s visit to Cuba Tuesday.Sergei Lavrov is in Havana meeting with his Cuban counterpart.Cuba has backed Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw “Radek” Sikorski, has been intimately involved in the Ukraine crisis, including in the negotiation of an agreement in February that then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych walked away from, further fueling the Maidan protest.

The United States plans to carry out small ground-force exercises in Poland and Estonia in an attempt to reassure NATO’s Eastern European members worried aboutRussia’s military operations in and nearUkraine, Western officials said Friday.

Despite much diplomatic effort, the situation in Ukraine worsens. A coordinated Russian campaign, including an invasion threat, special operations destabilization in eastern Ukraine patterned on the Crimea model, and warnings of gas cutoffs document ever more clearly Vladi­mir Putin’s aim to cripple the Ukrainian government and control much or even all of this strategically vital European country.

More than two decades after the Cold War supposedly came to a peaceful conclusion,Russia’s encroachment on Ukrainian sovereignty and its outright annexation of Crimea have occasioned a retro flashback. A byproduct of this geopolitical turmoil is NATO’s renewed importance to foreign policy.

With support growing for independence just months before Scots decide whether to break up with Britain, outsiders are weighing in with impassioned calls to keep the three-century-old union together.