On February 1, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Sochi. The meeting was not planned in advance: Lukashenka had reportedly only called his Russian counterpart on January 28 to request this engagement. This puzzled political commentators. After all, the two... MORE

At the height of recent anti-government protests in Chisinau, some Moldovans in the crowd may have hoped for Romania to intervene; but the Russian state media made it sound as if it this were a real possibility, if not an actual plan in Bucharest (Pervii... MORE

As January 2016 drew to a close, news pertaining to Belarus’s relations with its two large neighbors—Russia and Europe—again overshadowed any developments emanating from the Eastern European country itself. First, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued its report on Belarus’s recent... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Western officials and commentators seem, on the whole, to overestimate Russia’s capacity and intentions to recapture Moldova by exploiting that country‘s current crisis. This overestimation partly explains the recent decisions in Washington, Brussels and Bucharest to accept billionaire... MORE

Many international observers anticipated that Russia would move to exploit the anti-government protests in Moldova in order to (as the assumptions went) “destabilize Moldova’s pro-Europe government,” “halt and derail Moldova’s European course,” or even stage a “Maidan in reverse” in Chisinau. The Kremlin was, at... MORE

The government of Belarus hopes to initiate a new credit program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in February of this year (BelaPAN, January 11). Representatives of the IMF confirmed in recent months that they have seen considerable progress in their negotiations with the Belarusian... MORE

Up to now, the shaky ceasefire in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region has mostly continued to hold (see EDM, January 21). And thus, the Crimean peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in early 2014, has returned near the top of Kyiv’s international agenda. Following the... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Drawing together citizens of various ethnicities, divergent political affiliations, and fluid views on Moldova’s ultimate orientation (see Part One, EDM, January 28), recent massive social protests in Chisinau could mark the birth of a Moldovan civic identity, one... MORE

From January 20 through 24, tens of thousands of angry protesters rallied in Chisinau each day in -10° C (14° Fahrenheit) temperature to demand the resignation of the just-installed government, dissolution of the parliament—both institutions are now controlled by the billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc—and new parliamentary... MORE

Since an uprising unseated the pro-Russian regime of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, relations between Kyiv and Moscow have gone from bad to worse. Responding to a recent ban of Ukrainian imports and seeking a way to reach post-Soviet Central Asian states and... MORE