On June 22, Minsk hosted a large gathering of top diplomats from Central and Eastern Europe, who came to Belarus to participate in the annual foreign ministers’ meeting of the Central European Initiative (CEI). The event took place within the framework of the Belarusian presidency... MORE

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has completed its plan, announced last year (July 9, 2016) at the Alliance’s Warsaw Summit, to deploy four multinational battalions to Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania as a counter to the apparent Russian threat on its eastern flank, in... MORE

No sooner had the uproar caused by Svetlana Alexievich’s pronouncement about Belarusian Catholics (see EDM, June 15) calmed down, than a new scandal broke. Now, Russians are the offended party. Alexievich is the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. Born in 1948, in Ukraine, to... MORE

Rail Baltica, the European-standard-gauge railway project for the Baltic States, which also has important security implications (see EDM, October 19, 2016), is becoming a more important component of the future regional economy and security architecture. And now, Ukraine has expressed interest in joining this project... MORE

In 1953, subscribers to the third edition of the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia were told to cut out the pages in one of its volumes devoted to a biography of the by-then-disgraced Lavrenty Beria, Joseph Stalin’s last secret police chief, and replace them with an article... MORE

Belarus hosted the trilateral military exercise Slavic Brotherhood 2017, on June 6–14, bringing together Armed Forces personnel from Russia, Belarus and Serbia (Vsr.mil.by, June 16). The maneuvers were headed by Lieutenant General Andrei Ravkov (the defense minister of Belarus), Zoran Djordjevic (minister of defense of... MORE

On June 13–14, the European Union and Azerbaijan held another round of talks on the Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA). Those ongoing discussions were first inaugurated on February 6, with the official visit of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to Brussels. Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)... MORE

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has preliminarily ruled in favor of the Ukrainian state-owned oil and gas firm Naftohaz Ukrainy over Russian Gazprom’s claims regarding its natural gas supply. The same court is yet to rule on another contract between Naftohaz... MORE

On June 14, during the first international Global Cybersecurity Summit, in Kyiv, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksandr Turchynov, stated that “Ukraine has become a playground for the testing of the most up-to-date cyber techniques” by the Russian Federation (Ukrinform.ru,... MORE

In recent weeks, Moldova has been dealing with one foreign policy scandal after another. Relations with Russia, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the Council of Europe and even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have all been strained to varying degrees.... MORE