The atmosphere at the Friday (May 28) evening meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, was strikingly businesslike considering the intensity of Western condemnations of the act of “air piracy” five days prior. It was up to Putin, who played... MORE

Within the last three weeks, a series of decisions by leading Western powers seem to indicate a downgrading of Ukraine on the scale of Western policy priorities. Taken partly in deference to Russia, these decisions risk demotivating Ukrainian reform efforts (hesitant though these are) and... MORE

A couple of decades ago, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was branded in Brussels as “Europe’s last dictator.” At that time, Russia’s strongman, President Vladimir Putin, was cultivating a close partnership with his United States counterpart, George W. Bush, and publicly talked about cooperating with the... MORE

Over the past couple months, Russia and the West (the European Union and the United States) have mutually expelled more than 150 diplomats—high numbers in quick succession that, some observers argue, “did not even happen during the Cold War” (Newsru.com, April 24). And those numbers... MORE

For Ukraine, which lost more than 70 percent of its naval assets after Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea, the ability to effectively deter and adequately respond to further aggressive Russian actions at sea is extremely important. The crucial nature of properly addressing this threat was... MORE

At the end of April, Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that the Ministry of Health had granted emergency use authorization in Turkey to Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine (Anadolu Agency, April 30).  Sputnik V became the third vaccine to receive such approval, after China’s Sinovac and the Pfizer-BioNTech... MORE

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s decision to force down an airliner so as to be able to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich—the editor-in-chief of the influential anti-regime Telegram channel NEXTA (see EDM, September 23, 2020 and May 24, 2021)—sparked mixed reactions in Moscow. Those diverging opinions owe... MORE

On Sunday, May 23, Belarus made headlines around the world for diverting a commercial flight. Ryanair’s Boeing 737-8AS, in transit over Belarus from Athens to Vilnius, had to make an emergency landing in Minsk under the pretext of a bomb planted on board, the alarm... MORE

On May 20, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a highly personalized form, threatened to send his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, to prison. “I am his sentence [prigovor], he just does not want to comprehend this… I have been his sentence ever since I became president. He... MORE

Most commentators in Russia, Ukraine and the West tend to treat the Moscow-backed breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic (DPR, LPR), which together control about 3.3 million people in eastern Ukraine, as a single whole. But in reality, Russian analyst Yury Kovalchuk argues,... MORE