Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s political career in Ukraine has been defined by a dramatic series of ups and downs. He began, back in 2015, as an ally of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and was named head of Odesa’s regional administration. But since then, he... MORE

Despite Western diplomatic efforts and sanctions against Russia, Moscow continues to attack and put pressure on the last vestiges of organized political and social opposition in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in early 2014. Indeed, September and October brought renewed persecution on the... MORE

Newsworthy material from and about Belarus tends to either concentrate on Belarus’s relations with Russia, relations with the European Union or on domestic issues, including the economy. When it comes to headlines, external drivers of Belarus’s development often eclipse its domestic scene. Last week, however,... MORE

On October 3, Alexander Korzhych, a 21-year-old conscript, was found dead in the basement of his military unit, located in Borisov, a city in the Minsk region of Belarus. Korzhych was stationed at a training base devoted to five-month courses that transform ordinary soldiers into... MORE

The Moldovan Constitutional Court temporarily suspended the country’s president, on October 20, following a request by the government to interpret article 98, paragraph 6 of the Constitution, covering the president’s role in government reshuffles (Constcourt.md, October 20). The issue dates back to December 27, 2016,... MORE

In a dramatic reversal from years of earlier policy precedent, on October 6, Brussels extended an invitation to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus to participate in the November 25 summit of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) (Belta, October 11). Belarus is a member of... MORE

Foreign investments in renewable energy projects benefit Ukraine in the shift to clean energy, but they also are have wider geo-economic and national security importance for this struggling European democracy. Ukraine is currently pursuing a number of renewable energy ventures funded by foreign investments. The... MORE

By finalizing the construction of the Kerch Bridge (see EDM, September 6), Russia is completing its geopolitical project of fully cutting the Crimean Peninsula—which it illegally annexed in March 2014—off from mainland Ukraine. Russia’s chief gains from this effort are first of all to obtain... MORE

While Ukraine’s power plants are short of fuel, coal from the unrecognized Luhansk “people’s republic,” located in the Moscow-proxy-controlled eastern part of Donbas, has been smuggled to Poland, journalists from the Polish newspaper Dziennik have found. Doncoaltrade, a firm linked to Oleksandr Melnychuk, a former... MORE

Relatively few jihadist fighters have originated from Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) by comparison to the number of fighters seen from Western Europe. The networks in Western Europe are far larger, and CEEC jihadists have frequently only embarked on their path to violence after... MORE