On February 1, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Sochi. The meeting was not planned in advance: Lukashenka had reportedly only called his Russian counterpart on January 28 to request this engagement. This puzzled political commentators. After all, the two... MORE

As January 2016 drew to a close, news pertaining to Belarus’s relations with its two large neighbors—Russia and Europe—again overshadowed any developments emanating from the Eastern European country itself. First, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued its report on Belarus’s recent... MORE

The government of Belarus hopes to initiate a new credit program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in February of this year (BelaPAN, January 11). Representatives of the IMF confirmed in recent months that they have seen considerable progress in their negotiations with the Belarusian... MORE

Two recent public opinion polls have highlighted quite revealing results about populations living in Belarus and Ukraine. First, according to the Ukrainian polling firm Rating, the opinions of Ukrainians about Belarus are overwhelmingly positive. In the separatist areas of Donbas (the eastern Ukrainian region encompassing... MORE

Russia and Belarus have some of the closest relations in the post-Soviet space. Both are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). And together, the two countries make up the Union State.... MORE

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s visit to Moscow, which had been scheduled for November 25–26 and then postponed, eventually occurred on December 15. By most accounts, the contentious issues facing Lukashenka and his counterpart, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, were not resolved: the two sides neither agreed... MORE

On December 7, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, gave her Nobel lecture in Stockholm (Naviny.by, December 7). The lecture was delivered in Russian, the language in which Alexievich writes. In it, she first dwelled on her post–World... MORE

After several weeks of ostensible silence, discussions over a potential Russian airbase in Belarus have taken on new vigor. As early as September, President Vladimir Putin of Russia asked his government to sign the airbase agreement with Belarus. The initial public reaction of Putin’s Belarusian... MORE

The bombshell of late November was the postponement of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s visit to Moscow, where he was supposed to have met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The official reason given—that both sides were too busy to meet—is rather dubious. Indeed, Putin’s schedule... MORE

Two foremost Belarusian opposition-minded political analysts, Yury Drakakhrust of Radio Liberty and Tut.by along with Alexander Klaskovsky of Belarus’s non-state press agency BelaPan, recently published thought-provoking articles about the potential impact on Belarus of the November 13 “black Friday” terrorist attack (BFTA) in Paris. Both... MORE