The meeting between US State Secretary Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Reykjavik, Iceland, last week (May 19), was not supposed to resolve any disagreements, but it did clarify them (see EDM, May 20). Primarily, their extensive conversation was ostensibly focused on... MORE

On May 20, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a highly personalized form, threatened to send his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, to prison. “I am his sentence [prigovor], he just does not want to comprehend this… I have been his sentence ever since I became president. He... MORE

Most commentators in Russia, Ukraine and the West tend to treat the Moscow-backed breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (DPR, LPR), which together control about 3.3 million people in eastern Ukraine, as a single whole. But in reality, Russian analyst Yury Kovalchuk argues,... MORE

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, met for the first time in person on May 19, 2021, in Reykjavik, Iceland, on the sidelines of the Arctic Council ministerial. Their get-together represented an attempt to deescalate mounting... MORE

A precarious political standoff continues unabated in the Republic of Moldova, where the Russia-funded Party of Socialists (PSRM) desperately clings to power while trying to obstruct the conduct of snap parliamentary elections. The most recent development in this saga was the apparent stalling by the... MORE

On May 12, Ukrainian Defense Minister Andrii Taran stated that, for now, his country did not face any immediate danger of a Russian invasion through neighboring Belarus. Nonetheless, he assured that Kyiv was “meticulously monitoring the situation” and evaluating available plans for responding to such... MORE

On April 29, a conflict broke out on Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan’s shared border in the fertile and heavily populated Fergana Valley region, purportedly to force Tajikistani border troops to dismantle locally installed surveillance cameras. But the incident quickly devolved into intense brawling and a small-scale... MORE

Last March, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that his government would post a new tender for the construction of the Anaklia deep-water port (Report.ge March 31; Netgazeti, March 4). This mega-project, originally envisioned by former president Mikhail Saakashvili (in power 2004–2012), is the most... MORE

On May 19, one month will pass since the United States revoked its suspension of sanctions against several Belarusian public companies, mostly from the petrochemical industry (BelTA, April 20; State.gov, April 19). Despite the 45-day wind-down period established, it seems that the resuming restrictions have... MORE

In mid-May 2021, the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan began to take on a dangerous new dimension. In contrast to the last 25 years—when fighting between the two countries mainly took place on territory internationally recognized as Azerbaijan’s (with a notable exception last summer—see... MORE