Lacking mainstream political partners in Europe’s East, the Kremlin has recently picked the small, far-left Party of Socialists to advance Russia’s objectives in Moldova. The main objective is to undermine the pro-Western leadership team in Moldova, the European Union’s closest partner in the region. The... MORE

Moldova’s small Party of Socialists, pro-Kremlin and pro-Eurasia, has suddenly become Moldova’s single largest party after the legislative elections on November 30. Surpassing the Communist Party, Igor Dodon’s Socialists are now the leading leftist party, the primary recipient of Russian/”Russian-speaking” votes (but not confined to... MORE

“We are beginning the new year without any problems whatsoever, even small ones, in our relations as we have settled them all,” President Alyaksandr Lukashenka observed as recently as November 18, while receiving Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (Svaboda, November 28). Yet, barely nine days... MORE

The pro-Europe governing coalition has won narrowly, while the Red Left has shown new strength in Moldova’s parliamentary elections on November 30. The overall political outcome, if not entirely inconclusive, is at least somewhat ambiguous. The stakes in these elections far transcended Moldova in their... MORE

Since this summer, rumors have swirled that Moscow plans to create a Bessarabian People’s Republic on the territory of Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast. Some analysts have suggested that this would allow Moscow to build a bridge to the Transnistria region in Moldova and cut off Ukraine... MORE

The annexation of Crimea and the hybrid war with Russia that ensued have changed the Ukrainian government’s attitude toward the domestic military industry. Consequently, Ukraine’s arms production sector is likely to cease being an export-oriented industry that depended on Russia and exploited the fame of... MORE

“We have been flying with one wing and we badly need to engage the other one,” President Alyaksandr Lukashenka once quipped, in reference to Belarus’s asymmetric international engagements—too much with Russia, too little with the West. The imbalance, of course, is still there and so... MORE

Russia frequently seeks to reroute oil and gas pipelines and railway routes in order to bypass those neighboring countries that it hopes to put pressure on. In turn, the West puts forth competing pipeline and transit corridors whose aim is to allow these same countries... MORE

On November 20, Russian-occupied South Ossetia’s (Tskhinvali region) separatist regime declared that it is negotiating a new “comprehensive agreement on integration” with Russia, which will raise the relationship between the two sides to a “qualitatively new level,” especially in the military sphere (regnum.ru, November 20).... MORE

Last weekend (November 21), Ukraine marked the first anniversary of the EuroMaidan—the public protests in Kyiv that lasted through the hard winter of discontent and brought down the corrupt regime of Viktor Yanukovych on February 21. As its war for state survival continues to rage,... MORE