On June 7, Georgia kicked off a public discussion on the adoption of new constitutional amendments. This reform may prove to be the most important change to the country’s constitution since 1990, when Georgia held its first democratic multi-party elections. The proposed amendments will allow... MORE

A joke has long been making the rounds in Belarus that the country has produced three times as many presidents of Israel as native-born presidents of Belarus itself. Amazingly, this joke continues to accurately reflect reality, with the country’s first and only Belarusian-born head of... MORE

Borders remain in dispute throughout Central Asia, with Moscow paying such close attention that governments in the region now feel the need to warn the Russian authorities not to become involved (Ritmeurasia.org, June 5). Often Moscow offers its services as a peacemaker in an effort... MORE

On May 22, Armenian Health Minister Arsen Torosyan accused Georgia of hiding true statistics about the numbers of its people infected with the novel coronavirus and boasted that his country’s anti-epidemiological system was far superior to the Georgian one (Arminfo.info, May 22). His remarks sparked... MORE

*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