The Belarusian authorities’ forced landing of the Vilnius-bound Ryanair Flight 4978 at Minsk airport, on May 23, and the arrest of the opposition NEXTA Telegram channel founder Roman Protasevich, who was traveling aboard the plane, raised the political crisis happening inside Belarus since last August... MORE

A scandal erupted in Montenegro at the end of March: the head of the Balkan country’s National Security Agency (ANB), Dejan Vukšić, was charged with revealing secret information during a March 19 closed-door session of the parliament’s (Skupština) Security and Defense Committee. Committee member Raško... MORE

On the eve of a critical parliamentary election on April 4, the Bulgarian authorities have exposed a major case of espionage on behalf of Russia, which entangles several high-ranking defense ministry officials. Six Bulgarian citizens, including three active defense ministry personnel, were arrested on March... MORE

Turkish-Greek negotiations over the delimitation of their maritime zones in the Aegean Sea have persisted for decades. But the dispute spilled out into the wider Eastern Mediterranean after the discovery of large hydrocarbon resources there and efforts by other actors to solidify their own offshore... MORE

The latest People’s Republic of China–Central and Eastern European Countries (China-CEEC) summit took place online, on February 9, after a one-year break caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time, the high-level meeting was hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, aimed at providing the... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Post-Communist Romania’s first national warship-building program—a multi-role corvette— resides in legal limbo since being launched in November 2016, with none of the four planned vessels having been laid yet. After an initial attempt by the authorities to directly... MORE

In November 2016, the Romanian government decided to begin the first national warship-building program since the fall of Communism in 1989. More than four years have passed since this decision was been made, but no ships have been laid yet. The program for building four... MORE

On December 31, 2020, the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) delivered its first volumes of natural gas from the Shah Deniz field off the Caspian coast of Azerbaijan to Greece and Bulgaria. The 2,175-miles-long pipeline is the European leg of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) that connects... MORE

On October 19–20, Tallinn, Estonia, hosted the fifth summit of the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), a forum for dialogue involving a dozen European Union member states located in Central and Eastern Europe (ERR, October 19). The regional initiative was informally inaugurated in September 2015, on... MORE

As serious as the post-election political turmoil in Belarus has been, the upcoming presidential election in Moldova could pose an even greater challenge to policymakers in both Europe and the United States. Some observers warn that the Moldovan election could lead to disputes about the... MORE