*To read Part One, please click here. The quasi-annual charade surrounding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Membership Action Plans (NATO MAP) for Ukraine and Georgia took a different form at the Alliance’s June 14 summit in Brussels. The Joseph Biden administration has retreated from the... MORE

The heads of state and government of the North Atlantic Organization’s (NATO) 30 member countries held a summit at the Alliance’s Brussels headquarters on June 14. NATO summits usually take two days. This year’s vast agenda—reflected in an unusually long communiqué—clearly would have needed the... MORE

The Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (UASOF), the newest branch of the country’s Armed Forces, continue their development. Recently, UASOF operators conducted Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) defense training in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (the abandoned city of Pripyat). As part of the exercise, the operators... MORE

The Belarusian authorities’ forced landing of the Vilnius-bound Ryanair Flight 4978 at Minsk airport, on May 23, and the arrest of the opposition NEXTA Telegram channel founder Roman Protasevich, who was traveling aboard the plane, raised the political crisis happening inside Belarus since last August... MORE

The political crisis in Belarus and reactions to it have impacted this country’s relationships with all of its neighbors. Predictably, Russia’s role in keeping the Belarusian economy afloat has become even more significant as a result of Western sanctions and air blockade of Belarus. And... MORE

Two weeks after the Biden administration waived congressionally mandated sanctions on Nord Stream AG, the company behind the Nord Stream Two pipeline, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the first link of the subsea line is completed and ready for testing (Vesti.ru, June 4). But... MORE

President Joe Biden has landed in Britain on the first leg of a European tour to meet leaders of allied nations in a series of G7, NATO and US-EU summits ending with his first summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16,... MORE

The foreign ministers of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova signed a memorandum of understanding on establishing cooperation on European integration in Kyiv on May 17, forming a trilateral alliance called “Association Trio.” The primary goal of the new alliance is to make a concerted move toward... MORE

Most Russians and many in the West remain captive to the notion that Belarus is not that different from Russia given that its people speak Russian and its authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka rivals, and in some cases even exceeds, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in... MORE

On May 24, a meeting of Polish and Turkish representatives at the highest level took place in Ankara. The two countries’ presidents, Andrzej Duda and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, were accompanied by ministers and officials from various sectors, including agriculture, culture, and defense. Five bilateral agreements were... MORE