*To read Part One, please click here.   For almost three years, the Hungarian government has sought to instrumentalize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and some European Union institutions to pressure Ukraine into legislating certain entitlements for the Hungarian national community in Carpathian Ukraine.... MORE

Kyiv and Budapest have initiated an effort to resolve their differences over the impact of Ukrainian language and education laws on the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine’s Carpathian province (see EDM, June 3). Budapest’s position is based on a sui generis conception of Hungarian national... MORE

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka spoke with the workers of the Minsk Tractor Factory, on May 29 (ONT, Belta [1] [2], May 29). Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Lukashenka stated, “I am still of the opinion that it is more than just a disease. A disease is... MORE

Ukraine’s Carpathian province (Zakarpattia Oblast) is comparable in certain key respects with Bessarabia in the Odesa province (see EDM, May 28). Zakarpattia is another outlying territory where Kyiv’s influence is weak, local power brokers well-entrenched, the infrastructure desolate, and ethnic minorities—in this case the local... MORE

Water levels in Ukraine’s rivers and reservoirs are the lowest they have ever been since records began to be kept in 1885, threatening the health and well-being of Ukrainians and the incomes of Ukrainian industry and the government (Dsnews.ua, April 30; see EDM, June 1),... MORE

After Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka rejected the Kremlin’s so-called integration ultimatum at the end of 2019, and following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announced constitutional changes, the following January, to effectively reset his presidential term tally to zero (see EDM, January 14, 16, March 16), some... MORE

An abnormally dry fall, lack of meteorological winter and an early spring drought have nearly turned some regions of Ukraine into a desert. Between September 2019 and May 2020, only 70 percent of the normal amount of precipitation (153 out of an average rate of... MORE

It has again taken Ukraine many months to break down the domestic opposition of vested interests in order to qualify for much-needed international assistance. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently signed into law two key bills: one aimed at turning farmland into a sellable commodity, and the... MORE

On May 12, 2020, President Andrzej Duda approved the new Security Strategy of the Republic of Poland (“Strategia Bezpieczeństwa Narodowego”—SBN) (Bbn.gov.pl, May 12), which replaces long-outdated version from 2014 (Bbn.gov.pl, November 5, 2014). The SBN is the country’s most important strategic document regarding security and... MORE

Ukraine’s ethnic-Bulgarian minority is concentrated in the southwestern part of Ukraine’s Odesa province, an area often if somewhat inaccurately referenced as “Bessarabia.” It forms a triangle between the Dnister/Nistru River, the Danube Estuary and the Black Sea, adjacent to the Russian-controlled Transnistria, and bordering on... MORE