Latvian President Raimonds Vējonis announced new amendments to the set of education laws regulating the transition of all secondary education (high school) within the country into the official state language—Latvian. The system of bilingual high school education is thus set to end by 2022 (Diena.lv,... MORE

A series of accusations levied against Latvian banks and officials last week has seriously upended this Baltic State’s banking and financial system. First, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the United States Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against ABLV Bank. The sanctions announcement... MORE

Thanks to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as its own efforts, Latvia almost certainly is protected against a Russian military threat of the kind some in Moscow constantly threaten the Baltic States with. Indeed, a new Estonian government report specifically concludes that... MORE

In late January 2018, the Ministry of Defense of Latvia (MoD) reported plans to expand the National Guard (Zemessardzes) force to 12,000 by 2027. The largest component of the National Armed Forces and the basis Latvia’s territorial defense, the National Guard is currently made up... MORE

The biggest success for all three Baltic countries—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—last year was the arrival of the multinational battalion groups to the region, thus implementing the decisions reached at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 2016 summit in Warsaw (see EDM, February 23, 2017). Furthermore,... MORE

The joint strategic Russian-Belarusian military exercise Zapad 2017 (“West” 2017), which took place on September 14–20, is worth studying in detail because of what it reveals about Moscow’s likely military operations in the westward direction in the event of a regional crisis. At the same... MORE

The question of where to secure dependable energy supplies for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe was notably broached during United States President Donald Trump’s July visit to Poland. During his meeting with regional leaders in Warsaw, Trump stated that fast-growing US natural gas... MORE

Minsk is winning over Belarus’s neighbors. “We have stabilized our relations with Belarus… Today, there is no ideological war between our countries,” declared Witold Waszczykowski, the Polish minister of foreign affairs. This statement is impressive, particularly against the backdrop of Poland’s relations with Ukraine, which... MORE

In late June 2017, for the second time in the previous two months, Europe experienced a massive wave of cyberattacks, which also spread to the United States. Initially, the attacks—from a virus known as “Petya”—targeted Ukrainian and Russian companies, but then propagated to hit vulnerable... MORE

Rail Baltica, the European-standard-gauge railway project for the Baltic States, which also has important security implications (see EDM, October 19, 2016), is becoming a more important component of the future regional economy and security architecture. And now, Ukraine has expressed interest in joining this project... MORE