*To read Part One, please click here.   For almost three years, the Hungarian government has sought to instrumentalize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and some European Union institutions to pressure Ukraine into legislating certain entitlements for the Hungarian national community in Carpathian Ukraine.... MORE

Kyiv and Budapest have initiated an effort to resolve their differences over the impact of Ukrainian language and education laws on the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine’s Carpathian province (see EDM, June 3). Budapest’s position is based on a sui generis conception of Hungarian national... MORE

Ukraine’s Carpathian province (Zakarpattia Oblast) is comparable in certain key respects with Bessarabia in the Odesa province (see EDM, May 28). Zakarpattia is another outlying territory where Kyiv’s influence is weak, local power brokers well-entrenched, the infrastructure desolate, and ethnic minorities—in this case the local... MORE

Ukraine’s ethnic-Bulgarian minority is concentrated in the southwestern part of Ukraine’s Odesa province, an area often if somewhat inaccurately referenced as “Bessarabia.” It forms a triangle between the Dnister/Nistru River, the Danube Estuary and the Black Sea, adjacent to the Russian-controlled Transnistria, and bordering on... MORE

The parliament of Bulgaria has adopted a declaration criticizing Ukraine’s policy toward the Bulgarian minority in Odesa province (see EDM, May 26). This move might seem to indicate that Bulgaria is about to emulate Hungary or Romania, each of which, in its own way (Hungary... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   Moldova’s fugitive plutocrats, Vladimir Plahotniuc and Ilan Shor, are suddenly fighting back, using their jointly owned “anti-government bloc” in the Moldovan parliament. Plahotniuc and Shor had seemed quiescent since their departure 11 months ago. Now, however, they... MORE

Fugitive billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc’s godson, Andrian Candu, is spearheading an operation to regain a share of power in Moldova, under the guise of a parliamentary coalition. Plahotniuc was Moldova’s de facto ruler, flanked by Candu (then-chairperson of the parliament), until the June 2019 regime change,... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   While Mikheil Saakashvili served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Province (May 2015–November 2016), the region presented the former Georgian president with hurdles not only to system reforms but even to rational management as such. Those obstacles included:... MORE

Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has accepted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to chair the Executive Committee of Ukraine’s National Council for Reforms (Ukrinform, May 7). Taking up the new challenge, Saakashvili promised to draw on the experience of his universally recognized achievements in Georgia... MORE

In mid-April, Russia offered Moldova, at the latter’s insistence, an inter-governmental loan of €200 million ($217 million) on soft terms. Moldova’s Socialist-led government had planned this loan mainly for road construction, before the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic broke out. At present and in the near-to-medium term,... MORE