The Moldovan Constitutional Court temporarily suspended the country’s president, on October 20, following a request by the government to interpret article 98, paragraph 6 of the Constitution, covering the president’s role in government reshuffles (Constcourt.md, October 20). The issue dates back to December 27, 2016,... MORE

In a dramatic reversal from years of earlier policy precedent, on October 6, Brussels extended an invitation to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus to participate in the November 25 summit of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) (Belta, October 11). Belarus is a member of... MORE

Foreign investments in renewable energy projects benefit Ukraine in the shift to clean energy, but they also are have wider geo-economic and national security importance for this struggling European democracy. Ukraine is currently pursuing a number of renewable energy ventures funded by foreign investments. The... MORE

By finalizing the construction of the Kerch Bridge (see EDM, September 6), Russia is completing its geopolitical project of fully cutting the Crimean Peninsula—which it illegally annexed in March 2014—off from mainland Ukraine. Russia’s chief gains from this effort are first of all to obtain... MORE

While Ukraine’s power plants are short of fuel, coal from the unrecognized Luhansk “people’s republic,” located in the Moscow-proxy-controlled eastern part of Donbas, has been smuggled to Poland, journalists from the Polish newspaper Dziennik have found. Doncoaltrade, a firm linked to Oleksandr Melnychuk, a former... MORE

Relatively few jihadist fighters have originated from Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) by comparison to the number of fighters seen from Western Europe. The networks in Western Europe are far larger, and CEEC jihadists have frequently only embarked on their path to violence after... MORE

The joint Belarusian-Russian strategic military exercise Zapad 2017 may have generated more international interest than any previous Russian exercise since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The context included the marked deterioration of Russian relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) caused by Moscow’s... MORE

The week-long Russian-Belarussian strategic military exercise Zapad 2017 attracted close attention in Ukraine and the member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But this topic did not simply disappear after the formal end of the exercises on September 20; experts and analysts are... MORE

The joint Russian-Belarusian Zapad 2017 war games, which ran during September 14–20, inspired a wide-ranging debate about the nature and geopolitical realities of Belarusian statehood and independence. Thus, according to the Belarusian military analyst Alexander Alesin, the Kremlin had evinced utmost irritation with Minsk because,... MORE

The Russian government recently announced a hike in excise duties on ga­soline. The overall retail price will increase by more than a ruble per liter (6.5¢/gallon), or by around 2.5 percent of its current market price, by the end of the next year (Ekho Moskvy,... MORE