Over the past couple months, Russia and the West (the European Union and the United States) have mutually expelled more than 150 diplomats—high numbers in quick succession that, some observers argue, “did not even happen during the Cold War” (Newsru.com, April 24). And those numbers... MORE

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced earlier this year that a number of large infrastructure projects had been launched in the territories liberated from Armenian occupation as a result of the 2020 Second Karabakh War. Importantly, he added that friendly countries and partners would be involved... MORE

President Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly (parliament), delivered last Wednesday, April 21, following a long delay, was anticipated to present a whole host of major surprises; but the speech turned out to be surprising only for its extraordinarily low content (see... MORE

On April 4, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka proposed to “optimize” the number of Belarusian embassies and their staff around the world. Essentially, the Belarusian leader declared, if Belarus’s “diplomatic presence” in some countries has no “prospects” because of a minuscule volume of mutual trade and/or because... MORE

Introduction: Propaganda and Disinformation Recent events in the Czech Republic (CR) offer an interesting case study in Chinese propaganda and disinformation. For the purpose of this article, the distinction between propaganda and disinformation is understood to be the following: Propaganda creates a strategic, mostly positive... 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

On November 20, authorities ceremonially inaugurated the formation of the Forward Command of the United States Army’s V Corps (HQ-F) in its new location, the city of Poznań, in western Poland. The main component of the V Corps’ headquarters will remain in Fort Knox, Kentucky.... 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

Introduction As is true in much of Europe, the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Czech Republic heavily relies on the cultivation of political elites by party-state organs, overshadowing the role of coopted groups within the Chinese diaspora (China Brief, May 9;... MORE

Russian analysts fail to recognize that Warsaw no longer views the Intermarium—a historical term that today refers to the lands “in between” Russia and the West and the Baltic and Black Seas—as it did in the 1920s and 1930s but rather conceives it as a... MORE