The Russian government is committed to ensuring that Belarus remains dependent on Moscow and serves as a buffer state between the Russian Federation and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Minskdialogue.by, November 17). But because Russia lacks the ability to win an honest competition for... MORE

“We [in Belarus] have a genre [best described as] complaint songs. We love to take pity on ourselves and to cry out for compassion,” noted Igar Marzalyuk, who heads the Committee for Education, Culture and Science in the Belarusian parliament. Speaking recently at a roundtable... MORE

The United States embassy in Minsk announced, on November 1, the expansion of visa services in Belarus (By.usembassy.gov, November 1). On the same day, the embassy began accepting tourist and business visa applications for residents and citizens of Belarus who are age 50 and older.... MORE

“In Russia, at the centennial of the 1917 revolution, they talk so little about it that some people abroad developed a sneaking suspicion this jubilee is kept out of sight of the citizenry because officials do not know what to say about it,” Alexander Baunov,... MORE

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has never been our genuine friend, declares the Russian media outlet EurAsia Daily. According to an article there by Kirill Nemiga, in the early 1990s Lukashenka was ready to lead the Belarusian Popular Front (BPF) but realized that its strand of... MORE

Newsworthy material from and about Belarus tends to either concentrate on Belarus’s relations with Russia, relations with the European Union or on domestic issues, including the economy. When it comes to headlines, external drivers of Belarus’s development often eclipse its domestic scene. Last week, however,... MORE

On October 3, Alexander Korzhych, a 21-year-old conscript, was found dead in the basement of his military unit, located in Borisov, a city in the Minsk region of Belarus. Korzhych was stationed at a training base devoted to five-month courses that transform ordinary soldiers into... MORE

In a dramatic reversal from years of earlier policy precedent, on October 6, Brussels extended an invitation to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus to participate in the November 25 summit of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) (Belta, October 11). Belarus is a member of... MORE

The joint Belarusian-Russian strategic military exercise Zapad 2017 may have generated more international interest than any previous Russian exercise since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The context included the marked deterioration of Russian relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) caused by Moscow’s... MORE

The week-long Russian-Belarussian strategic military exercise Zapad 2017 attracted close attention in Ukraine and the member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But this topic did not simply disappear after the formal end of the exercises on September 20; experts and analysts are... MORE