News that the United States is weighing the possibility of establishing a permanent military base in Poland as well as Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly have both elicited spirited debates inside Belarus, providing useful insight into how the... MORE

Like the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) against which it is arrayed, the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development has for years attracted attention less for what it is doing than for the fact that it has survived. Established in 1997 by Georgia, Ukraine,... MORE

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not wait long to deliver its promised S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Syria. On the night of October 3, a huge An-124 Ruslan transport plane unloaded four mobile launchers, radars and command vehicles at Russia’s local Khmeimim airbase. This demonstrative... MORE

An intense dispute between Hungary and Ukraine sparked by the notorious “language question” and fate of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine (see EDM, July 17) has now received powerful new impetus, threatening to seriously degrade diplomatic relations between the two countries (Eurointegration.com.ua, July 2). The... MORE

The vast majority of voters who took part in Macedonia’s referendum on September 30 supported changing the country’s name to North Macedonia in order to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, as outlined in the so-called Prespa Agreement, signed between... MORE

The population of the Russian Federation is falling by 700 people a day, or more than a quarter of a million a year (Narzur.ru, September 23). The decline stems from a combination of rising death rates, changes in the age structure of the population (resulting... MORE

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) was probably the Alliance’s most important and secretive institution during the Cold War. Notably, it worked out NATO members’ joint strategy and tactics for using non-strategic nuclear weapons in a possible all-European war with the... MORE

One of the dangers of traveling in a small ship is the possibility of forceful swaying in rough waters. Belarus is a small ship, and it is supersensitive to the weather around it. From the west, the weather appears rather calm, as the international legitimacy... MORE

Recent tensions between local members of volunteer battalions and the police threaten to spark another wave of protests in Ukraine on the fifth anniversary of the EuroMaidan revolution. In mid-September, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine extradited to Russia Timur Tumgoev, a 31-year-old Ingush man... MORE

After the week-long Vostok 2018 large-scale Russian strategic maneuvers ended on September 17 and the initial hot takes went to press, the Russian blog Naspravdi rebutted Western observations, declaring, “[I]f we consider that America, from time immemorial has only understood the language of power, I... MORE