*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Russia resorted to military interventions repeatedly to stop Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014, 2022) from drawing closer to the Euro-Atlantic system. Those interventions aimed, in effect, to coerce Tbilisi and Kyiv... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Any status of neutrality is subject to legal and political interpretations, within or outside the country in question, at any given time; all the more so when Moldova’s neutrality is uncodified by treaty and unrecognized internationally in any... MORE

Russia’s war in Ukraine, with an undisguised goal to advance on Odesa, threatens by the same token to open a corridor to Transnistria and bring Russian forces onto Moldova’s and Romania’s land borders. These looming threats and risks must jump-start efforts by Moldova’s Western partners... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here.   Moldova’s leftist-Russophile parties are surging in public opinion polls by blaming the multifaceted economic crisis on the country’s pro-Western authorities (see EDM, August 8). This ruthless demagogy is a contributing... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Moldova’s Russophile parties aim to force snap parliamentary and presidential elections this year, capitalizing on an unprecedented economic crisis to topple the pro-Western leadership (see EDM, August 4). Maia Sandu and her Action and Solidarity Party (Moldovan acronym,... MORE

Russia’s war in Ukraine and general assault on the European order are impacting Moldova more directly and dangerously than any of Ukraine’s (or, for that matter, Russia’s) other neighboring countries. Chisinau’s firmly Western-oriented leadership took charge, barely one year ago, of the weakest and most... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Russia has set up a military-civil administration (MCA) in Ukraine’s occupied Zaporyzhzhia region along the same considerations as it did in Kherson region. Moscow is now adding a Zaporyzhzhia “regional government” to the MCA, as it has done... MORE

Russia is fastening its grip on Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporyzhzhia regions through military-civil administrations (MCAs). Moscow employs MCAs as the main instruments of its occupation policy in southern Ukraine, quite unlike the familiar model of relying on local “republics” (i.e., Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Donetsk,... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Russia gave plenty of early warning of its intentions to keep Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporyzhzhia regions permanently under occupation and attach them to Russia. Yet, Moscow’s multiple early warnings seemed to pass unnoticed in the West, until The... MORE

The United States has finally taken notice of Russia’s plans to “attempt the annexation of additional Ukrainian territories,” citing “massive evidence from both intelligence and open sources.” The realization is belated, as displayed in the official briefing’s grand sense of urgency. The White House anticipates... MORE