The Russian government has a long tradition of raising territorial disputes against any neighboring country that seeks to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) because Moscow hopes that the existence of such purported disputes will slow down or even stop the process of these... MORE

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has energized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in every possible way, reviving the alliance’s purpose and unity, and granting it new attractiveness in Europe as well as greater prominence in the Indo-Pacific. The prospect of Finland and Sweden joining the... MORE

On October 13, a man shot eight people with a bow and arrow in Kongsberg, Norway, a town southwest of the capital city, Oslo. Five people were killed, and three others were injured. The suspect, identified as 37-year-old Espen Andersen Bråthen, a Danish citizen born in... MORE

The Norwegian Nobel committee’s decision, announced last Friday (October 8), to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Dmitry Muratov as well as Philippine journalist Maria Ressa evoked astonishment, anger and elation across Russia. Muratov himself was astounded (he rejected the first... MORE

As a fairly small (population-wise) country squeezed between Russia and the European Union, Belarus is destined to be a geopolitical tuning fork, whose reactions and demeanor, if properly understood, provide valuable feedback to the policies of its more powerful neighbors. Thus, one can observe that... MORE

In late summer, Latvia and Finland officially agreed on a deal for Riga to purchase more than 200 armored personnel carriers (APC) developed by the Finnish company Patria as well as the transfer of technological “know-how,” so that some of the 6x6 wheeled platforms that... MORE

On September 10, the project company Nord Stream 2 AG informed that the last weld has been finished, making the Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline fully complete from a technical perspective (Nord-stream2.com, September 10). At the same time, speculation in the media began to... MORE

The eighth meeting of the World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples took place in Tartu, Estonia, on June 16–18. These congresses, which are held in a different city every four years, are also political summits, usually attended by presidents of the world’s three Finno-Ugric-majority countries—Finland, Estonia... MORE

As the self-styled Islamic State (IS) “caliphate” collapsed in March 2019, the international community was faced with the problem of more than 70,000 IS family members stranded in Syria. The Kurdish Peshmerga gathered these family members into camps in northeastern Syria. Currently, these camps still... MORE

Scandinavian Countries Contend with Lingering Influence of Islamic State Jacob Zenn In recent weeks, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have experienced incidents involving Islamic State (IS) members and supporters operating on their territories. On March 8, for example, Sweden prosecuted a 31-year-old woman who had traveled... MORE