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

It is worth noting that, in recent months, two segments of the Belarusian analytical community—zealously Russia-oriented commentators on the one hand, and the radical Westernizing opposition on the other—have conspicuously not published anything of substance. The leading wordsmiths from the former group are in jail... MORE

Mali: Limited Progress on Sahel Joint Force The proposed anti-terror joint force of the Sahel G5 nations — Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — received a boost this month when the EU pledged the equivalent of $56 million to bolster security efforts in... MORE

“Not merely tanks and weapons can kill, words can too,” wrote archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of Belarusian Catholics, in his resentful letter to Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. “The war that Russia started in Donbas is on Russia’s conscience,” Alexievich... MORE

The recent decision by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to ban popular Russian social networks VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki, on May 15 (see EDM, June 7), provoked serious debate both inside Ukraine and abroad. Now that the initial anxiety over that ban has somewhat subsided, it... MORE

Twice in the past several weeks, Russian intrusions put the Baltics on high alert. On June 1, several Russian soldiers, traveling from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad without transit permits, were stopped in Lithuania (Apollo.lv, June 2). A week later, two Goryn-class tugboats—the MB-119 and... MORE

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Sochi, on May 17, a few days before the G7 summit, which was organized by Italy and held in Taormina, Sicily. The Trump-Gentiloni meeting focused on a number of pressing issues, from economic... MORE