It is worth noting that, in recent months, two segments of the Belarusian analytical community—zealously Russia-oriented commentators on the one hand, and the radical Westernizing opposition on the other—have conspicuously not published anything of substance. The leading wordsmiths from the former group are in jail... MORE

President Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in show (this year held on June 15) directed at the citizens of Russia, who can ask him any kind of question, was meant to offer a bit of fresh excitement to the boring summer political season. But Putin’s televised performance ended... MORE

“Not merely tanks and weapons can kill, words can too,” wrote archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of Belarusian Catholics, in his resentful letter to Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. “The war that Russia started in Donbas is on Russia’s conscience,” Alexievich... MORE

The recent decision by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to ban popular Russian social networks VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki, on May 15 (see EDM, June 7), provoked serious debate both inside Ukraine and abroad. Now that the initial anxiety over that ban has somewhat subsided, it... MORE

President Vladimir Putin (64) has not yet officially announced whether he will run for a fourth term as head of state on March 18, 2018. During the traditional annual nationwide live multi-hour televised phone-in, held this year on June 15, Putin did not announce his... MORE

Twice in the past several weeks, Russian intrusions put the Baltics on high alert. On June 1, several Russian soldiers, traveling from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad without transit permits, were stopped in Lithuania (Apollo.lv, June 2). A week later, two Goryn-class tugboats—the MB-119 and... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on May 22, in Sochi, where he called for broadening the use of space technologies to improve the domestic economy and national defense, specifically referring to ballistic missile launch sensing satellites. He called for having at least 15... MORE

As Moscow prepares to finalize the new State Armaments Program to 2025 (Gosudarstvennaya Programma Vooruzheniya—GPV) in September (see EDM, June 12), numerous reports hold out the prospect of continued military modernization with an emphasis on high-technology and modern assets. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu promises the arrival... MORE

On June 8, Georgia’s months-long, contentious constitutional reform debate took a new turn when the Georgian parliamentary speaker, Irakli Kobakhidze, declared that the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party would no longer include in the new constitution a clause legally enabling foreign citizens and entities to... MORE

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Sochi, on May 17, a few days before the G7 summit, which was organized by Italy and held in Taormina, Sicily. The Trump-Gentiloni meeting focused on a number of pressing issues, from economic... MORE