On April 29, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka delivered his annual address “to the people and the parliament.” By far the most frequently discussed excerpt from his remarks—however awkward and tangential it may have been to the actually significant topics of the 2-hour-and-40-minute speech—was Lukashenka’s digression devoted... MORE

Moscow has had little or no success in mobilizing ethnic Russians as a whole in Belarus against the current government in Minsk: the local Russian community, in almost all cases, blends easily with the Belarusian majority. But there is one group within that community with... MORE

Despite the limited applicability of a zero-sum game approach and the vital necessity for Belarus to maintain good relationships with both East and West, Belarus’s government continually stands accused of treacherous geopolitical maneuvering. Such accusations are particularly common for Russian media. Thus, Regnum, a news... MORE

On April 22–24, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka paid his first ever official visit to Georgia. The visit was filled with pageantry and emotional declarations, as President Lukashenka met with Georgian President Giorgi Margevlashvili, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, and the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church,... MORE

Russian imperialists have insisted that more than any other place within the former Soviet space, Belarus is artificial. They reach this conclusion on the basis that Belarus is culturally related to Russia on many measures, had only a brief experience with national independence before 1991,... MORE

Ukraine has to generate $15.3 billion over four years with the help of a debt restructuring plan agreed, last March, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF, which approved a new $17.5 billion loan for Ukraine and issued the first $4.9 billion tranche, expects... MORE

Addressing Russia’s populace and, implicitly, Ukraine in his annual phone-in dialogue (see Part One in EDM, April 23), Russian President Vladimir Putin torpedoed the Minsk Two agreement beyond repair: “I say outright and unequivocally: there are no Russian forces in Ukraine” (Kremlin.ru, April 17). Quite... MORE

In his annual phone-in conversation with Russia’s populace and in follow-up interviews, President Vladimir Putin has expounded at length on Russia’s current policy objectives regarding Ukraine (Interfax, Kremlin.ru, April 16, 17). Putin’s remarks evidenced both strategic consistency and tactical adjustments necessitated by Ukraine’s ongoing political... MORE

This week (April 21), Russian prime minister and former president Dmitry Medvedev spent several hours presenting to the State Duma (lower house of parliament) the annual government report on policies and achievements in 2014, as required by the constitution. According to Medvedev, Russia is under... MORE

Informational warfare has been a critical part of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine. As Russian military reporter and veteran of the Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, Arkadiy Babchenko, argues, “I believe this [the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war] is the first war in the entire history triggered... MORE