On October 13 the foreign ministers of the 27 member-states of the European Union met in Luxemburg and agreed to lift sanctions on travel for 36 high-ranking members of the Belarusian government, including President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, for a trial period of six months. The decision... MORE

Moscow has claimed that Kyiv’s recent decision to banish several Russian TV channels from Ukrainian cable TV networks was a violation of bilateral accords and of the rights of Russian speakers. Kyiv, on the other hand, says that the Russian channels in question violated Ukrainian... MORE

For the first time since the Soviet era, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet undertook an offensive operation in August of this year when it attacked Georgia, landing Russian ground forces in Abkhazia. The Russian Fleet, mainly based in Sevastopol, misused Ukraine’s territory and abused Ukraine’s neutrality... MORE

Like the political crisis in the spring of 2007, the crisis unfolding since September has placed great strains on law enforcement agencies (see EDM, June 1, 2007). On April 2, 2007, and now again on October 8, the president disbanded parliament. In the spring of... MORE

On October 9 Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko disbanded parliament and scheduled an early parliamentary election for December 7. This was the result of the breakup of the ruling coalition of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine-People’s Self-Defense bloc (NUNS) and the bloc of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (BYT)... MORE

With President Viktor Yushchenko’s disbanding of the Ukrainian parliament on October 8 and legal squabbles over new elections, the continuing Ukrainian-Russian negotiations over 2009 gas supplies for Ukraine appear to have taken a back seat to the political drama being acted out in Kyiv. How... MORE

The global financial crisis has not affected Ukraine directly as its stock market is underdeveloped, and mortgage loans do not play a major role in the local economy. But the consequences of the crisis should have a significant impact on the local economy, which depends... MORE

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s working visit to Washington in late September left many observers wondering what, if anything, the visit had accomplished. The apparent purpose of the trip was to seek greater security assurances for Ukraine from the United States and gauge the level of... MORE

After the parliamentary electionscin Belarus on September 28, both President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and his close ally, Lidziya Yarmoshyna, Chairperson of the Central Election Commission, have stated that they expect the EU to lift sanctions against Belarus’s leaders and develop closer relations. On the face of... MORE

On September 29 the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) protested against an appeal made by the Russian delegation to the OSCE about the Crimea. “Methods and dirty technology created in the ’90s of the last century are being used to destabilize the situation in... MORE