On July 7, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin and Ambassador Zurab Abashidze, the special envoy of the Georgian prime minister for relations with Russia, held a special meeting in Prague. One of the topics of the meeting was further development of transport coordination between... MORE

On July 14, Russia’s State Duma (the parliament’s lower chamber) adopted a law, which allows citizens of countries where the Russian language has a constitutionally accepted official status—Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—to work in Russia as drivers without having to exchange their national driver’s license. Leonid... MORE

On July 14, several hundred agitated participants of the “March of Georgians”—a loose alliance of identitarian political groups, some of them self-proclaimed “fascists” (Facebook.com, July 14)—rallied along Aghmashenebeli Avenue, in central Tbilisi (YouTube, July 14). The political mainstream of the country largely ignored the happening.... MORE

Minsk is winning over Belarus’s neighbors. “We have stabilized our relations with Belarus… Today, there is no ideological war between our countries,” declared Witold Waszczykowski, the Polish minister of foreign affairs. This statement is impressive, particularly against the backdrop of Poland’s relations with Ukraine, which... MORE

July 22 marked the end of the 12-day Sea Breeze 2017 exercise (UNIAN, July 25), conducted in the Black Sea and on Ukrainian territory with the participation of Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Moldova’s new electoral legislation—“Law for Amending and Completing Certain Legislative Acts [i.e. the Electoral Code]”—is the outcome of a bargain between the country’s de facto leader Vladimir Plahotniuc, who controls the state apparatus, and the pro forma head... MORE

On July 20, Moldova’s parliament changed the country’s Electoral Code, with an eye to the 2018 parliamentary elections. The new legislation—the “Law for Amending and Completing Certain Legislative Acts [i.e. the Electoral Code]”—also applies to future presidential elections and future referendums (Moldpres, July 20, 21;... MORE

Since the end of the Soviet system, the greatest source of conflicts in the North Caucasus has been neither Islamism nor nationalism but rather property—over who controls this or that piece of land. The collapse of industry in the cities only intensified this problem in... MORE

Russian media announced, on July 14, that the new (122.5-kilometer) railway connection between the southwestern Russian towns of Zhuravka and Millerovo will be completed by mid-August (Rzdp.ru, July 14). Originally, these two cities were linked by a Soviet-era railroad that, in part, crosses eastern Ukraine.... MORE

In late June 2017, for the second time in the previous two months, Europe experienced a massive wave of cyberattacks, which also spread to the United States. Initially, the attacks—from a virus known as “Petya”—targeted Ukrainian and Russian companies, but then propagated to hit vulnerable... MORE