Relations between Turkey and Greece are the most fractious of any pair of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 29 member countries. Disputes range from contested offshore hydrocarbon exploration to Athens granting political refugee status to two of eight Turkish officers who fled to Greece... MORE

Russians are not unanimous in their attitude toward Belarus. According to popular Belarusian online portal Tut.by’s Artyom Shraibman, politically influential Russians fall into three camps: Technocrats-Monetarists (e.g., Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev or former deputy prime ministers Arkady Dvorkovich and Anatoly Chubais), Imperialists (many “siloviki”—representatives of... MORE

On May 25, the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) ordered Russia to release and repatriate to Ukraine all 24 sailors and three naval vessels, seized through military force off Crimea’s coast exactly six months earlier (see EDM, November 26, 2018),... MORE

The international community has devoted significant attention to the actions of Russian authorities in occupied Crimea to repress, marginalize and force out Crimean Tatars, a crime against humanity that involves harassment, arrests, and other kinds of mistreatment that are all too visible (Krymr.com, May 29).... MORE

Last fall, during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) massive Trident Juncture 2018 military exercises, 31 allied and partner countries, over 50,000 personnel, 10,000 vehicles, 150 aircraft and some 60 warships, including the carrier USS Harry Truman, gathered to practice large-scale maneuvers in Norway as... MORE

Serbia is preparing to sign a free trade agreement with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in October, hoping to gain access to a market of 180 million people. At the same time, the Western Balkan country’s accession negotiations with the world’s largest trading bloc,... MORE

The interregnum in Kyiv invites probing from Moscow. “Let us start from a clean slate. We are open to dialogue,” the Russian Federation Council’s (upper chamber of the Russian parliament) chair, Valentina Matvienko, signaled to Ukraine via state-owned news agency TASS, on May 29. “We... MORE

Introduction: China’s (Junior) European Partners in the “16+1” On the heels of People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Xi Jinping’s busy bilateral tour in Western Europe in March, PRC Premier Li Keqiang started his own multilateral tour in Eastern Europe in April. Designed primarily to... MORE

On May 9, a newly formed military-patriotic movement, Young Guard–Yunarmia, opened the Victory Day parade in Donetsk, the largest city in de facto occupied eastern Ukraine (Dan-news.info, May 9). Earlier, members of the movement took part in events dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the... MORE

Until the Russian Federation launched a barrage of cruise missiles against Syria from ships in the Caspian Sea in October 2015 (see EDM, October 26, 2015), few people in the West devoted much attention to Russia’s Caspian Flotilla, viewing it, if at all, as a... MORE