On November 30, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka gave a 2.5-hour-long interview to Dmitry Kiselev, the director general of Russia’s media giant VGTRK (YouTube, December 2). Subsequent commentary online and in broadcast outlets focused specifically on two of Lukashenka’s statements: 1) his recognition of Crimea as... MORE

New revelations on the laundering of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda through local actors in the Czech Republic point to an underresearched aspect of influence operations. The CCP’s tactic of “borrowing a boat to go out to sea” (借船出海, jie chuan chu hai), i.e., coopting local... MORE

Introduction In May, the United Kingdom’s (UK) Carrier Strike Group (CSG) led by the HMS Queen Elizabeth set off for the Indo-Pacific region on a seven-month deployment, which is the first of its kind (UK Ministry of Defence, May 22). The CSG has so far... MORE

Kyiv’s western allies continue to express concern over the buildup of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine (see EDM, November 8, 29). US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was “concerned about reports of atypical Russian military activity” (Voice of America—Russian... MORE

In the past several weeks, relations between Moscow and Washington nosedived, with multiple overlapping potential crises and increasingly toxic rhetoric aggravating an already dangerous situation. The Ukrainian crisis has been simmering to one degree or another since Russia took over Crimea in 2014 and sponsored... MORE

Ukraine is actively preparing to implement new legislation in the field of Territorial Defense (Armyinform.com.ua, November 2)—namely, the Law of Ukraine “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance,” which was signed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last July (President.gov.ua, July 29). This Law stipulates that Ukraine’s... MORE

On November 15 and 17, Angela Merkel, the outgoing chancellor of Germany, telephoned Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka (RBC, November 17). While, on November 14 and 16, Belarus’s Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei had two phone conversations with Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. While Kyiv, Berlin and Paris pursue (with varying degrees of intensity, frantically in Kyiv’s case) a high-level “Normandy” meeting as a goal for its own sake, without conditions or a clear agenda, Moscow is setting maximalist conditions for... MORE

Russian diplomacy is testing its rogue-state practices on its Western diplomatic counterparts, and finds them malleable. On November 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov unilaterally publicized the confidential messages recently exchanged between himself and his German and French counterparts, Heiko Maas and Jean-Yves Le Drian,... MORE

Crisis is brewing yet again in the intrinsically antagonistic relations between Russia and Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin seeks to harvest richer political dividends from it than he did half a year ago. The apparent buildup of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border follows much... MORE