The Minsk city administration allowed the opposition-based Organizing Committee (OC) of the centennial celebration of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BPR) (see EDM, January 25) to organize a meeting and a concert downtown, at a square park adjacent to the capital city’s massive opera house. Both... MORE

On February 19, after a decade of investigations, Spanish prosecutors finally launched a major trial against notable members of the Russian mafia operating in the Iberian country. All in all, sufficient evidence was collected against 18 persons (cases, however, were opened against 27 alleged members... MORE

The ataman (head) of the Kuban Cossack voisko (army), Nikolay Doluda, reported that a National Guard platoon made up entirely of Cossacks is being created in Krasnodar Krai. This Cossack National Guard platoon will eventually be scaled up to a company, a battalion or even... MORE

Ukraine’s national oil and natural gas company, Naftogaz Ukrainy, claimed a final victory in a four-year dispute over gas supply and transit with Russia’s Gazprom. The Stockholm arbitration court, where Naftogaz and Gazprom sued each other in 2014, last December obliged Naftogaz to pay much... MORE

Montenegro’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) last year, the European Union’s announcement that it will resume enlargement before 2025 to include at least one Balkan state, Serbia’s evident oscillation between East and West, as well as recent progress on resolving the Greco-Macedonian... MORE

A series of accusations levied against Latvian banks and officials last week has seriously upended this Baltic State’s banking and financial system. First, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the United States Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against ABLV Bank. The sanctions announcement... MORE

Kyiv claims Russia has been siphoning off natural gas from offshore fields it seized from Ukraine in 2014, after forcibly annexing Crimea. The Ukrainian government detailed its claims in a memo submitted to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg.... MORE

If there is a common refrain to be found in the continual stream of ostensibly disparate but newsworthy developments related to Belarus, it is the country’s lingering quest for national unity. Lately, this overarching narrative has been entangled in Belarus’s Olympic triumphs in PyeongChang. First,... MORE

On January 31, Colonel Anatoliy Gorodetskiy, commander of the 152nd Missile Brigade based in Chernyakhovsk (Kaliningrad Oblast), claimed that the infrastructure necessary to host the Iskander-M mobile ballistic missile system (NATO classification SS-26 Stone), with a striking range of 500 kilometres, has been fully prepared... MORE

Moscow’s appetite in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov has not decreased after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia has gradually advanced its presence into significant areas of the exclusive maritime economic zone of Ukraine, which, in accordance with international law, is... MORE