Since Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, in 2014, the peninsula’s most important port city of Sevastopol has largely escaped close international scrutiny. In some sense, this is understandable—compared with the “Republic of Crimea” (as the rest of the peninsula was renamed by the occupying Russian... MORE

During his address to the 20th Plenary Session of Uzbekistan’s Senate, on June 21, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev expressed fears that the country’s manufacturers could face increasing difficulties accessing their traditional export markets. His suggested solution, to join the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU—the Russian-dominated regional trade... MORE

On July 17, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for the fifth time since the beginning of 2019. Earlier this year, they spoke in Minsk, Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), Bishkek and Sochi. This time, the venue for their meeting was the... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Moldova’s regime change in June 2019 has overtaken some of the key assumptions of Western diplomacy in the Transnistria conflict-settlement negotiations. One Western assumption relates to the settlement’s content. It holds that the settlement (“special status”) must be... MORE

The Ukrainian snap parliamentary elections are scheduled for July 21. According to the latest opinion survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KMIS), at least four political parties are expected to enter the Verkhovna Rada: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People (polling... MORE

Moldova’s Socialist President Igor Dodon seems to have cast aside his old, pet “federalization” project, which would have empowered Transnistria in Chisinau and thereby empowered Russia in a federalized Moldova (see EDM, July 17). Dating back to 2013, his project is still displayed on the... MORE

The Union State Treaty between Russia and Belarus (signed in April 1997) declares, in Chapter II, Section II, Articles 17–18, that border security falls into a group of key bilateral issues that must be solved jointly. In practice, this gives Russia control over Belarus’s external... MORE

Ambassadors from Russia, Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the United States, and the European Union, collectively the mediators and observers to the Transnistria conflict-settlement negotiations, held talks in Chisinau and Tiraspol on July 12. This group seeks to promote the... MORE

July 20, 2019, marks the 25th anniversary of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s rule. Unlike most post-Soviet national leaders, he had no background in the Soviet nomenklatura, rising to the helm of power from a state farm director and defeating the acting–prime minister, Viachaslau Kebich, a... MORE

In mid-June, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU) ruled that the snap parliamentary elections called by newly inaugurated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be scheduled for July 21 (Pravda.com.ua, June 20; see EDM, May 22). Recent polling, conducted by the sociological firm Rating, shows that 42.3... MORE