Editor’s Note: For many years, stories have circulated about instances of alleged involuntary organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China. However, due to the difficulty of confirming these accounts—and due perhaps as well to their lurid and disturbing nature—the veracity of these alleged accounts... MORE

Introduction The propaganda apparatus of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is in full swing: to ward off the negative international repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the PRC’s diplomatic corps and state media are actively asserting Beijing’s perspectives online. For example, in April the Chinese... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   While Mikheil Saakashvili served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Province (May 2015–November 2016), the region presented the former Georgian president with hurdles not only to system reforms but even to rational management as such. Those obstacles included:... MORE

Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has accepted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to chair the Executive Committee of Ukraine’s National Council for Reforms (Ukrinform, May 7). Taking up the new challenge, Saakashvili promised to draw on the experience of his universally recognized achievements in Georgia... MORE

In the evening of May 6, the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) deprived Alexei Kruchinin, a journalist from Russian TV’s First Channel, of accreditation, effectively sending him and his camera crew packing (Tut.by, May 6). The reasoning behind this move was a four-minute-long TV... MORE

The pandemic and the partially related collapse in oil prices will lead to the highest budget deficit in the Russian regions for the past 20 years, despite the support of the central government, says a recent assessment by the global credit rating agency S&P. Regions... MORE

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the ongoing disinformation campaign in Armenia. Old and new false claims and biased narratives have been actively promoted in recent weeks by multiple actors, foreign and domestic. A Russian propaganda campaign pursuing geopolitical objectives has, to a large extent, overlapped... MORE

The celebration of the 75th anniversary of Victory (always with a capital “v”) in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany was supposed to be the pivotal political moment of the year, marked by an extravagant parade on Red Square and multiple public shows. The... MORE

Belarus has been preoccupied in recent days with President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s decision not to cancel this year’s annual May 9 Victory Day military parade, which marks arguably the country’s most important public holiday. “I must say that we cannot cancel the parade,” declared Lukashenka on... MORE

Kazakhstan was the first country in Central Asia to enact a state of emergency, effective March 16, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was followed, on March 25, by Kyrgyzstan; while the other three regional states—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan—have yet to move in the... MORE