Belarus remains at the center of a geopolitically tinged maelstrom of emotions enveloping the country. And in recent weeks, that maelstrom was simultaneously fed by Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei’s latest interview with RBC as well as a telling new poll regarding Belarusian public opinion... MORE

Moscow continues to put pressure on Ukraine by conducting various aggressive psychological operations (psy-ops) designed to ignite panic in Ukrainian society and disrupt military cooperation between Ukraine and the West. One of its latest such attempts actively combined a disinformation campaign with the Tsentr 2019... MORE

Russia’s “central role” in organizing the political space of rising non-Western Eurasia had been proclaimed at various forums and brainstormed by many political minds in previous years; but last week, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly attempted to give this notion new energy and content. His main... MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has yielded to Russia in accepting the Steinmeier Formula, a procedure for implementing the Minsk “accords” on Russian-defined terms (see EDM, September 17, 24, 25, 26). On October 1, in the Minsk Contact Group, Ukraine agreed to incorporate the core part... MORE

The Ukrainian crisis has been at the center of Russia’s confrontation with the West since February 2014, when a popular revolution, seen in Moscow as a Western-sponsored coup, ousted the pro-Russian government of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. This, the Kremlin believed, was an attempt by... MORE

Moscow has seemingly long wanted to have it both ways (see EDM, April 2, 23) on the Montreux Convention, which governs naval passage through the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles). On the one hand, Russia has cast itself as a supporter of this... MORE

President Igor Dodon has effectively disavowed Moldova’s sponsorship of the United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) resolution, adopted one year ago at Chisinau’s initiative, that called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldova’s Transnistria region. Addressing the UNGA on September 26 (Presedinte.md, accessed September 29),... MORE

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka conducted a press conference for Ukrainian journalists in Minsk, on September 26. Compared to Lukashenka’s more regular face-to-face contacts with the Russian media, the scale of this briefing was decidedly smaller. Whereas the 2016 press conference for Russian journalists involved 80 reporters... MORE

On August 19–29, Russia hosted the multinational exercise Defenders of Friendship 2019, which involved the joint participation of Russian and Egyptian paratroopers as well as Belarusian special forces (Mil.ru, August 16, 2018). The exercise was the fourth of its kind in four years. Its first... MORE

Moscow has found itself in a weaker position in its negotiations with Kyiv on continuing natural gas transit through Ukraine to Europe after December 31. The current ten-year gas transmission agreement between Russia’s Gazprom and Naftogaz of Ukraine will expire at the end of the... MORE