September and October saw a fresh wave of house searches, arrests and increasing oppression of regime critics on the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. But last week (October 25), two Crimean Tatar political prisoners, Akhtem Chiygoz and Ilmi Umerov, were freed and extradited to Turkey after Turkish... MORE

Vladimir Putin’s Anschluss of Crimea gave him a big political boost, and Russians still overwhelmingly support the annexation of that Ukrainian peninsula. But support for Russian forces and their clients in Donbas is declining, with ever more Russians against backing these breakaway groups and expressing... MORE

Few coastal Ukrainian cities have historically suffered as many instances of destruction only to be rebuilt time and time again as Ochakiv. And today, the Ochakiv Naval Base is set to host a $750,000 maritime operations center, which the United States Navy is building for... MORE

Ukraine has entered a new heating season with almost 17 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas stored in its underground reservoirs, according to Ukrtransgaz, the gas transportation and storage subsidiary of the state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz Ukrainy (Utg.ua, accessed October 30). This... MORE

Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s political career in Ukraine has been defined by a dramatic series of ups and downs. He began, back in 2015, as an ally of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and was named head of Odesa’s regional administration. But since then, he... MORE

Despite Western diplomatic efforts and sanctions against Russia, Moscow continues to attack and put pressure on the last vestiges of organized political and social opposition in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in early 2014. Indeed, September and October brought renewed persecution on the... MORE

Newsworthy material from and about Belarus tends to either concentrate on Belarus’s relations with Russia, relations with the European Union or on domestic issues, including the economy. When it comes to headlines, external drivers of Belarus’s development often eclipse its domestic scene. Last week, however,... MORE

Taking ownership of and “conquering” the Arctic are themes Russian authorities love to amplify. But sometimes, the harsh Northern reality interferes. The crash of an Mi-8 helicopter in Svalbard (Spitsbergen), last Thursday (October 26), with eight lives lost, was one such occasion. Norway launched a... MORE

In recent months, Islamic State (IS) has made a number of public threats against Italy, with a number of its fighters expressing their willingness, via their Telegram channels, to target the country and claiming they will “conquer Rome”  (La Repubblica, August 19, 2017, La Stampa,... MORE

On October 3, Alexander Korzhych, a 21-year-old conscript, was found dead in the basement of his military unit, located in Borisov, a city in the Minsk region of Belarus. Korzhych was stationed at a training base devoted to five-month courses that transform ordinary soldiers into... MORE