The announcement, on Wednesday, July 21, of the agreement between the United States and Germany allowing for the completion of Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline project comes at a time when Russia is undertaking a full-scale effort to manipulate the European gas market, deplete... MORE

The German Federal Prosecutor's Office (GBA) is investigating a case of an employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania who is suspected of divulging classified information (Spiegel, July 2). On the same day of... MORE

It took a telephone call from United States President Joseph Biden last Friday (July 9) afternoon to convince President Vladimir Putin to abandon his “principled” stance on upholding Syria’s sovereignty and to grant consent to keeping the corridor for delivering humanitarian aid to the rebel-controlled... MORE

The perception of China as a growing and global threat has become a bipartisan issue in Washington that more or less seamlessly persisted through the handover of power from the previous presidential administration to the current one. Indeed, over the past several months, the United... MORE

After the introduction of sectoral sanctions by the European Union (see EDM, June 30), Minsk suspended its membership in the Eastern Partnership initiative as well as in the Readmission Agreement with the EU. Belarus’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also recommended that the head of the... MORE

The summit in Geneva between Presidents Joseph Biden of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia was supposed to stabilize bilateral relations by demarcating areas and issues each side deemed so important that any hostile incursion would encounter a strong response. In the present-day... MORE

During his annual televised national call-in show, on June 30, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin mostly talked about the COVID-19 pandemic, as the novel coronavirus is once again sweeping through Moscow and the provinces. Implicitly (but deliberately) embodying the image of the “good tsar” versus... MORE

On June 10, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio paid an official visit to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. The rich agenda broached all aspects of bilateral relations... MORE

On June 21 and 24, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada imposed several new sanctions packages against Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime. The actions form part of a coordinated Western response to the serious human rights abuses observed in Belarus... MORE

On June 24, the Council of the European Union introduced so-called sectoral sanctions against Minsk. According to the well-informed Russian business daily Kommersant, despite their formidable appearance, the actual strength of these European sanctions is likely to fall short of expectations. Thus, when it comes... MORE