Moldova’s pre-term parliamentary elections, on July 11, have produced an even more sweeping sea change than anticipated (see EDM, July 8, 9). The Western-oriented opposition, concentrated in the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS), surged to 53 percent of the votes cast. PAS has dethroned... MORE

On June 24, Russia’s state-owned oil transit system operator Transneft announced that hydrocarbon producers Rosneft and Surgutneftgaz had not reserved any pipeline volumes for transporting oil to the Belarusian refinery Naftan for the third quarter of 2021 (TASS, June 24). Transneft’s announcement did not come... MORE

*To Read Part One, please click here. The Electoral Bloc of Communists and Socialists (BECS) would probably nominate Igor Dodon (Moldova’s president in 2016–2020) as the next prime minister, if BECS wins the snap parliamentary elections, scheduled to take place on Sunday, July 11. Dodon’s... MORE

Moldova could break out from its cycle of political instability and economic decay, provided that President Maia Sandu’s creation, the Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS), gains an outright parliamentary majority on its own in the July 11 elections. That scenario mainly depends on a... MORE

After the introduction of sectoral sanctions by the European Union (see EDM, June 30), Minsk suspended its membership in the Eastern Partnership initiative as well as in the Readmission Agreement with the EU. Belarus’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also recommended that the head of the... MORE

The summit in Geneva between Presidents Joseph Biden of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia was supposed to stabilize bilateral relations by demarcating areas and issues each side deemed so important that any hostile incursion would encounter a strong response. In the present-day... MORE

Like the Russian Federation, Ukraine has created registered Cossack communities to integrate them into the state and society. That move has put these groups at odds with independent Cossack groups, some of which are opposed to such integration on principle and, in certain cases, are... MORE

During his annual televised national call-in show, on June 30, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin mostly talked about the COVID-19 pandemic, as the novel coronavirus is once again sweeping through Moscow and the provinces. Implicitly (but deliberately) embodying the image of the “good tsar” versus... MORE

On June 10, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio paid an official visit to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. The rich agenda broached all aspects of bilateral relations... MORE

On June 21 and 24, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada imposed several new sanctions packages against Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime. The actions form part of a coordinated Western response to the serious human rights abuses observed in Belarus... MORE