“Not merely tanks and weapons can kill, words can too,” wrote archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of Belarusian Catholics, in his resentful letter to Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. “The war that Russia started in Donbas is on Russia’s conscience,” Alexievich... MORE

Twice in the past several weeks, Russian intrusions put the Baltics on high alert. On June 1, several Russian soldiers, traveling from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad without transit permits, were stopped in Lithuania (Apollo.lv, June 2). A week later, two Goryn-class tugboats—the MB-119 and... MORE

The Polish Ministry of National Defense (MoND) has expressed interest in acquiring next-generation main battle tanks (MBT) for the country’s ground forces. On May 30, the MoND’s Armament Inspectorate issued a call to domestic and international arms manufacturers to submit offers for consideration. The document... MORE

The outbreak of the mass EuroMaidan street protests in Kyiv (2013) and Russia’s subsequent aggression against Ukraine convinced the Kremlin of the need to project Russian “soft power” to blunt any response from Europe. However, Western countries ostracized Russia particularly after it illegally and forcibly... MORE

Since the beginning of February 2017, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has begun to implement the decision taken at the Alliance’s summit in Warsaw last July to deploy a rotational battalion-sized combat unit to each of the Baltic States and Poland. The bolstering of... MORE

On November 23, the European Parliament adopted a non-binding resolution aimed at consolidating the European countries in countering Russian propaganda and preventing cyber attacks. The resolution included strong language stressing that the European parliament is “seriously concerned by the rapid expansion of Kremlin-inspired activities in... MORE

Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s historic visit to Riga, Latvia, on November 4, marked the opening of a new chapter in relations between Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During his three-day visit, Li met together with the heads... MORE

Earlier this month (October 2016), the governments of the Baltic States and Poland finally reached all the necessary political, financial and technical agreements to implement one of the most ambitious projects inside the European Union—linking Finland, the Baltic States and Poland with the unified Trans-European... MORE

The nine-month-long argument about the price of Russian natural gas for Belarus has finally been resolved—for now. Belarus will compensate Russia for underpayment from January 1 to July 1, 2016 (during that period, Belarus payed only $73 per 1,000 cubic meters instead of $132, as... MORE

The ruler of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has finally reacted to the ongoing scandal related to Chechen refugees stuck in Belarus since the summer (see EDM, September 29). Using his favorite means of public communication, Instagram, Kadyrov dismissed claims that residents of Chechnya have to leave... MORE