It was a year ago last Friday (July 17) that the Boeing 777 Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a missile over eastern Ukraine, resulting in a loss of 298 lives. The shock of that tragedy awakened... MORE

Twice in recent days (July 10 and 14), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande have jointly demarched Kyiv to, first, legalize the Donetsk-Luhansk authorities in Ukraine’s constitution, and next, to legitimize those authorities through local elections in those territories. Moscow has been... MORE

In his interview to Euroradio, the charge d’affaires of the European Union’s delegation in Belarus, Richard Rudolph, underlined the gradual improvement in the relationship between the EU and Belarus. But he also made the following observation regarding Belarus’s willingness to have good relations with both... MORE

The Greek government’s wide-ranging efforts to prevent the country’s financial collapse finally culminated in an agreement with the European Union, on July 13 (see EDM, July 14). The bailout deal provides new concessions regarding Greece’s debt. While the EU may have saved Athens from financial... MORE

On July 17, 2014, Malaysian passenger jet Flight MH17 was shot out of the sky over the territory of Ukrainian Donbas controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, killing all 298 people on board (most of them—Dutch citizens). The Ukrainian authorities have accused the separatist rebels of shooting... MORE

The Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector (AGRI)—a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, which aims to bring Azerbaijani gas and, in the future, gas from Turkmenistan to Romania and Hungary by way of Georgia and across the Black Sea—was at the center of attention of regional decision makers late... MORE

By its illegal occupation of Crimea, Moscow has transformed that Ukrainian peninsula into an island, the second non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation and one that is already giving the Russian government and the Russian economy serious problems—as Kaliningrad long has (Ekho Moskvy, July 10).... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has entrusted Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, with jolting Odesa province from backwardness into modernity, and to try this amidst a war. This unprecedented reform experiment has turned Odesa into a pivotal province of... MORE

It was a rare coincidence in world politics that two pivotal and protracted negotiation processes—the European Union’s talks with Greece on managing its debt, and the “P5+1” talks on managing the Iranian nuclear program—both culminated in crucial agreements at the start of this week (July... MORE

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the United States’ ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev descended on Odesa in separate visits (July 2–July 8), to confer with Governor Mikheil Saakashvili there. Georgia’s former president aims to turn this undeveloped province of Ukraine into... MORE