Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka paid a two-day visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, over April 13–14. The trip had initially been scheduled for late 2020, but it was postponed due to two significant events (Azertag.az, April 14; Belta.by, April 15). First, the August 2020 presidential election protests... MORE

The international community has focused on Moscow’s buildup of forces on land adjoining Ukraine, concerned that such a concentration of Russian military power will be used against its neighbor (see EDM, April 8, 15, 19). But as Moscow routinely insists, it has the right to... MORE

The socio-political conflict in Belarus has the potential to grow even more acute, even though street rallies have all but disappeared and the authorities have, for several months now, pursued a harsh counter-offensive. Those arrests and firings continue. Thus, in Grodno, Andrzej Pisalnik, the secretary... MORE

On April 16, in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in person and with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who joined by video-link midway through the conversation. The three leaders’ shared goal at this juncture is to defuse the perceived... MORE

As the tensions over the buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border continued to escalate, United States President Joseph Biden phoned his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on April 13. Their conversation raised hopes in some quarters of an impending de-escalation around eastern Ukraine as... MORE

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced today (April 13) that Moscow is sending 15 naval vessels from its Caspian Flotilla to waters off Ukraine to take part in military exercises there. Earlier, Russian and Ukrainian media had reported stories about a smaller number. Although the... 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

Putting military pressure on Ukraine could have seemed to the Russian leadership to be the most practical way to assert Moscow’s central role in international affairs. The standard working assumption in the Kremlin is that facing a risk of violent conflict, the disunited West would... MORE

Increasingly deadly skirmishes between Moscow-backed “separatist” forces and the Ukrainian military in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas have claimed the lives of dozens of combatants and civilians since January 1. The ceasefire agreement arranged in July 2020 has largely collapsed. Yet despite intermittent clashes,... MORE

The key descriptor for Belarusian society at the moment may be “disintegration.” Namely, Belarusians appear not to see eye to eye on three major issues. One is their attitude toward President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s leadership and legitimacy. The second is geopolitical lean: whether toward Russia or... MORE