On November 15 and 17, Angela Merkel, the outgoing chancellor of Germany, telephoned Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka (RBC, November 17). While, on November 14 and 16, Belarus’s Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei had two phone conversations with Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. While Kyiv, Berlin and Paris pursue (with varying degrees of intensity, frantically in Kyiv’s case) a high-level “Normandy” meeting as a goal for its own sake, without conditions or a clear agenda, Moscow is setting maximalist conditions for... MORE

Russian diplomacy is testing its rogue-state practices on its Western diplomatic counterparts, and finds them malleable. On November 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov unilaterally publicized the confidential messages recently exchanged between himself and his German and French counterparts, Heiko Maas and Jean-Yves Le Drian,... MORE

Crisis is brewing yet again in the intrinsically antagonistic relations between Russia and Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin seeks to harvest richer political dividends from it than he did half a year ago. The apparent buildup of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border follows much... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Moldova’s natural gas market has become physically accessible to non-Russian gas suppliers through the Romania-Moldova interconnector, the Iasi–Ungheni–Chisinau pipeline. Built and operated by Romanian Transgaz and declared operational as of October this year after long delays, the interconnector... MORE

The Republic of Moldova presents a unique combination of economic and political vulnerabilities to Russian energy servitude. The Kremlin has underscored this situation by hitting Moldova’s recently elected, Western-oriented government with a natural gas supply crisis on the cusp of winter. Russia’s gas export monopoly,... MORE

On November 12, Istanbul hosted the eighth summit of the Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States (Turkic Council), attended by the leaders of member states Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and of observer states Hungary and Turkmenistan (Turkkon.org, November 12). The summit, dedicated this... MORE

Belarus and Moscow have signed a new Union State Military Doctrine, though the document remains unpublished. This comes within the context of the Belarus crisis that began with President Alyaksandr Lukashenko’s disputed reelection on August 9, 2020, and recently worsened due to the migrant issues... MORE

Since the victory of Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh War (September 27–November 9, 2020), Russian commentators have been concerned about Ankara’s efforts to create a union of Turkic states under its aegis. And that alarm has only intensified now that Turkey has established... MORE

The political crisis in Belarus is far from over. Its internationalization along the lines of a geopolitical tug-of-war between Russia and the West began well before the current showdown over Middle Eastern migrants. Stuck at the Polish border (see EDM, November 11), the masses of... MORE