On September 29 the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka attended the end of joint military exercises at the Obuz-Lesnovsky firing range in Belarus. The two stage "Zapad 2009" (West 2009) began on September 8, involving a total of 12,500 servicemen,... MORE

This week in Bucharest, high-level representatives of the Russian energy business and their Italian allies are making their strongest pitch yet for Romania to join their South Stream gas transport project. Romania is the latest target in Moscow's recent effort to enlist additional countries in... MORE

On September 26 the official publication of the Russian ministry of defense Krasnaya Zvezda announced the beginning of the second phase of Zapad 2009 (West 2009), a large-scale combined arms exercise conducted in Belarus. This phase of the exercise lasted from September 26-29 and involved... MORE

The Ukrainian media has started to debate who the United States might support in the upcoming January 17, 2010 presidential elections. This issue is closely related to the question of which "political technologists" the presidential candidates will employ: American or Russian. On August 31 Alyona... MORE

Disinformation, or the planting of false information to deceive or smear an enemy, is now being regularly used by both government and non-governmental players in Russia and Ukraine in the fierce battles for control of power and assets in these countries. During the January 2009... MORE

Another appeal to Western governments from renowned public figures, this time over Georgia, has appeared in European newspapers (Le Monde, Die Welt, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, September 22, 23). Signed by the Czech, Lithuanian, and Estonian former heads of state and government (Vaclav Havel,... MORE

Ukraine's second most popular presidential candidate, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, suspects that President Viktor Yushchenko -who is running for a second term- of conspiring to disrupt the presidential election scheduled for January 17, 2010. Yushchenko, to whom opinion polls give no more than 2-4 percent... MORE

A representative group of Ukraine's cultural elite has alerted Western governments and public opinion to Russia's mounting threats against Ukrainian independence. Alarmed by Moscow's latest moves, the signatories of the appeal are also concerned by the failure of Western governments to respond by using existing... MORE

The 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War in 1939 has been commemorated worldwide. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has denounced revisionism and attempts to belittle the Soviet victory. In Belarus, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka commemorated September 17 as the pivotal date in the... MORE

The poor state of Ukrainian-Russian relations, as vividly noted in Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's August letter to President Viktor Yushchenko, the expulsion of two Russian spies from Ukraine and Russia's newly adopted law giving its military the right to intervene abroad is intensifying the debate... MORE