A wide gap, a chasm in fact, persists between Ukrainian and most Western official definitions of what would constitute a successful outcome in Ukraine’s struggle to defeat Russia’s full-scale invasion. Washington, Berlin and Paris have again indicated most recently that their support for embattled Ukraine... MORE

*Read Part One. As part of its recent clean break with Russia, the Moldovan leadership is calling for the unconditional and complete evacuation of Russian forces unlawfully stationed on Moldova’s territory in Transnistria. Unconditional withdrawal means not preconditioned on a “special status” that Chisinau would... MORE

The first move to disentangle from an externally imposed, potentially fatal diplomatic process is to change the semantics. Along with this move, the country—Moldova in this case—must assert the priority of its own interests over those who caught it in this trap—namely, Russia and its... MORE

The Munich Security Conference, running from February 17 to 19, and the upcoming one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022, are high water marks of support from the United States and Europe to Ukraine. These two events are made-to-order... MORE

*Read Part One Here. Ukraine’s leadership and public opinion are adamant in ruling out land-for-peace tradeoffs with Russia. Leadership statements and public opinion surveys testify to this attitude. Such tradeoffs have, nevertheless, been proposed in a recent RAND Corporation report (Rand.org, January 2023). Ukrainian territorial... MORE

The boldest prescription yet for a United States–abetted defeat of Ukraine by Russia—and, ipso facto, a Western defeat—has come out of one unit of the RAND Corporation in Washington, DC. It envisages large territorial concessions by Ukraine to Russia—in effect, more and even more land... MORE

*Read Part One here. *Read Part Two here. *Read Part Three here. Russia, immersed in its war against Ukraine, does not currently have Moldova in its crosshairs, at least as long as Ukraine holds out. Russia has adopted a reactive posture regarding Moldova. The Kremlin seems... MORE

*Read Part One here. *Read Part Two here. The European Union has recently granted Moldova the status of candidate country for EU membership (Consilium.europa.eu, June 24, 2022). By way of consequence, the security arrangements of an EU candidate country cannot be left to an organization... MORE

*Read Part One here. The “5+2” forum on Transnistria was designed in 2005 based on the old model of the European Concert, updated as Euro-Atlantic: to settle a local conflict through negotiations among great powers. Similarly, the negotiating formats on the conflicts in Karabakh (1994–2020),... MORE

Russia’s war against Ukraine has dealt the coup de grâce to the “5+2” negotiations on the settlement of conflict in Transnistria, the forum where Russia and Ukraine sit next to each other. Moscow and Kyiv have been seated formally at the top of the table,... MORE