*To read Part One, please click here.   For almost three years, the Hungarian government has sought to instrumentalize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and some European Union institutions to pressure Ukraine into legislating certain entitlements for the Hungarian national community in Carpathian Ukraine.... MORE

On May 31, Russian security forces killed two alleged militants in the suburbs of the Ingushetian city of Sunzha, in an area where officials had introduced a counter-terrorism operation regime. The Russian National Antiterrorist Committee reported that the suspects were surrounded in an uninhabited building.... MORE

Kyiv and Budapest have initiated an effort to resolve their differences over the impact of Ukrainian language and education laws on the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine’s Carpathian province (see EDM, June 3). Budapest’s position is based on a sui generis conception of Hungarian national... MORE

Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka spoke with the workers of the Minsk Tractor Factory, on May 29 (ONT, Belta [1] [2], May 29). Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Lukashenka stated, “I am still of the opinion that it is more than just a disease. A disease is... MORE

Ukraine’s Carpathian province (Zakarpattia Oblast) is comparable in certain key respects with Bessarabia in the Odesa province (see EDM, May 28). Zakarpattia is another outlying territory where Kyiv’s influence is weak, local power brokers well-entrenched, the infrastructure desolate, and ethnic minorities—in this case the local... MORE

The month of May is important from the perspective of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict because it marks the anniversaries of both the occupation of Azerbaijan’s Shusha city and Lachin districts (rayons) as well as the later signing of the “ceasefire agreement”—the terms of which are still... MORE

Water levels in Ukraine’s rivers and reservoirs are the lowest they have ever been since records began to be kept in 1885, threatening the health and well-being of Ukrainians and the incomes of Ukrainian industry and the government (Dsnews.ua, April 30; see EDM, June 1),... MORE

A respected economic policy think tank in Uzbekistan released the results of a recent poll on the attitudes of both public- and private-sector professionals inside the country about Uzbekistan’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Review.uz, May 20).... MORE

An abnormally dry fall, lack of meteorological winter and an early spring drought have nearly turned some regions of Ukraine into a desert. Between September 2019 and May 2020, only 70 percent of the normal amount of precipitation (153 out of an average rate of... MORE

The Russian authorities are caught in a familiar dilemma of whether to resume economic activity or contain the coronavirus pandemic and, trying to have it both ways, are blundering the former while failing in the latter. The economic contraction for April is estimated at 12... MORE