A new point of acute East-West tension has emerged on the Polish-Belarusian border. Minsk and the West have been at loggerheads since August 2020, when Belarus’s strongman, Alyaksandr Lukashenka (ruling since 1994) declared himself reelected for a sixth consecutive presidential term in office. Massive protests... MORE

The recent defeat in the Estonian parliament of a resolution denouncing Moscow’s russification of non-Russian peoples reflects two diametrically opposed trends. On the one hand, the down-vote is a product of the increasing unwillingness of Europe and the West to focus attention on this issue—an... MORE

Since Soviet times, Russian analysts have mused about the possibility that Germany might try to recover Kaliningrad, or East Prussia as it was known before Joseph Stalin seized it at the end of World War II. Later, during the 1990s, they focused on the risk... MORE

In the 1990s, the status of ethnic Russians who did not automatically become citizens in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was a lively topic—especially in Moscow, where policymakers hoped to use those communities as a pressure device or even a fifth column against these countries. With... MORE

Military exercises not only make known what a government believes could happen but become an occasion for its analysts and those in other countries to speculate as to what the outcomes of a real military conflict would be if the scenarios were to be applied... MORE

In late summer, Latvia and Finland officially agreed on a deal for Riga to purchase more than 200 armored personnel carriers (APC) developed by the Finnish company Patria as well as the transfer of technological “know-how,” so that some of the 6x6 wheeled platforms that... MORE

On September 10, the project company Nord Stream 2 AG informed that the last weld has been finished, making the Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline fully complete from a technical perspective (Nord-stream2.com, September 10). At the same time, speculation in the media began to... MORE

The political crisis in Belarus seems to have entered the stage of unstable equilibrium both inside the country and along its perimeter. A system in this position accelerates away from steadiness if displaced even slightly. As Yauhenii Preiherman, who heads the Minsk Dialogue platform, opined,... MORE

The Nord Stream Two saga is far from over. Although the agreement between the United States and Germany would allow for the physical completion of this natural gas pipeline (directly linking Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea), its certification and especially its future operation... MORE

The international situation both triggered the ongoing crisis in Belarus—at least in the minds of some observers—and continues to have implications for its evolution. According to Belarusian KGB head Ivan Tertel, the August–September 2020 rallies protesting the official presidential election results were expressly sparked from... MORE