On April 29, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka delivered his annual address “to the people and the parliament.” By far the most frequently discussed excerpt from his remarks—however awkward and tangential it may have been to the actually significant topics of the 2-hour-and-40-minute speech—was Lukashenka’s digression devoted... MORE

Moscow has had little or no success in mobilizing ethnic Russians as a whole in Belarus against the current government in Minsk: the local Russian community, in almost all cases, blends easily with the Belarusian majority. But there is one group within that community with... MORE

Russia’s March 17, 2014, annexation of Crimea plunged Russian-Western relations to their lowest level since the Cold War. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) subsequently imposed sanctions on Russia over its actions toward Ukraine. Notably, a pair of Mistral-class helicopter assault ships being... MORE

Despite the limited applicability of a zero-sum game approach and the vital necessity for Belarus to maintain good relationships with both East and West, Belarus’s government continually stands accused of treacherous geopolitical maneuvering. Such accusations are particularly common for Russian media. Thus, Regnum, a news... MORE

On February 17, three British teenagers left their East London homes and boarded a plane for Turkey. Soon afterwards, they crossed into Syria, where they are believed to have joined the Islamic State militant group (al-Jazeera, February 21). This event has put female radicalization in... MORE

In early April 2015, the Polish Internal Security Agency’s Governmental Computer Security Incident Response Team (also known as CERT—Computer Emergency Response Team), released its annual report on cyber security in Poland (Cert.gov.pl, April 3). According to the report’s findings, Poland came under a record number... MORE

On April 22–24, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka paid his first ever official visit to Georgia. The visit was filled with pageantry and emotional declarations, as President Lukashenka met with Georgian President Giorgi Margevlashvili, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, and the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church,... MORE

Russian imperialists have insisted that more than any other place within the former Soviet space, Belarus is artificial. They reach this conclusion on the basis that Belarus is culturally related to Russia on many measures, had only a brief experience with national independence before 1991,... MORE

Ukraine has to generate $15.3 billion over four years with the help of a debt restructuring plan agreed, last March, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF, which approved a new $17.5 billion loan for Ukraine and issued the first $4.9 billion tranche, expects... MORE

The European Commission delivered, on April 22, a “statement of objections” resulting from its probe launched back in September 2012, which amounts to charging Gazprom with abusing its dominant position on the gas market in several EU member states. The content of the charges has... MORE