Executive Summary: The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is gradually losing its position at home–and more rapidly in some post-Soviet states–due to its slavish support of Putin’s war in Ukraine. While Kyiv is about to ban its branch, Tallinn is demolishing a compromise... MORE

Russia’s geopolitical influence is increasingly shrinking in the Baltic Sea region. The most recent episode in the region’s worsening relations with Moscow was the sudden arrival of hundreds of migrants from the Middle East and Africa in November to the busy border crossing between Russia... MORE

Russia forced what it calls “the collective West” into significant concessions for this year’s Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) annual meeting of foreign ministers. Using its statutory veto and blocking powers, Moscow forced the organization to replace Estonia with Malta to chair... MORE

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is holding its annual meeting at the level of foreign ministers from November 30 to December 1 in North Macedonia, the organization’s chair for 2023. Several Western governments—including those in Washington, Berlin, and Paris—are coming to the... MORE

On October 8, the Balticconnector natural gas underwater pipeline running between Finland and Estonia was shut down due to significant damage on the portion of the pipeline within Finland’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). According to preliminary findings from the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, the... MORE

In September 2023, all European Union member states bordering Russia introduced an entry ban on cars sporting Russian license plates. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the first to implement the policy, albeit with Vilnius leaving open an exception for transit from the Russian exclave Kaliningrad... MORE

Nansen passports may soon be making a comeback as a means of coping with the possibility that thousands of Belarusians and potentially tens of thousands of Russians will be left without statehood due to actions by their governments and their flight abroad (Nezavisimaya gazeta, March... MORE

Following Ukraine’s successful Kherson counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, the war in Ukraine has moved into the Materialschlacht, or war of attrition phase, which is rapidly depleting critical resources. Typically, when discussing resources in this sense, Ukraine is most often referring to the tanks,... MORE

The weekend mutiny launched by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group will have numerous wide-ranging consequences that analysts are still trying to sort out. However, more attention should be drawn to the fact that one of main reasons for this insurrection’s rapid failure was the... MORE

Ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics are declining in number not only because of flight and an excess of deaths over births among them but also because some in these communities are increasingly identifying with the titular nation and even assimilating with it. This... MORE