Last Friday (December 7), Lithuania became the first country to impose new sanctions against Russia for its forceful and illegitimate action against three Ukrainian ships in the Kerch Strait on November 25 (RBC, December 7). This naval skirmish (see EDM, November 26, 28, 29) was... MORE

In line with China’s continuing westward economic expansion, it may launch free trade talks with Ukraine. Stepan Kubiv, Ukraine’s economy minister, coming back from a visit to China where he met Chinese Vice Premier Liu He last month, said Ukraine asked China to start consultations... MORE

Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, suffered another mishap while undergoing overhaul work (capitalny remont) at a dockyard in Roslyakovo, near Murmansk. The Kuznetsov was being renovated while moored inside floating dock PD-50—the biggest such dock in Russia and one of the largest in... MORE

The president of the Republic of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaitė, joined her counterparts from across Central-Eastern Europe to attend a summit of the Three Seas Initiatives (3SI) in Bucharest, Romania, on September 17–18. At this grouping’s latest top-level meeting, the 12 participating leaders from the Baltic,... MORE

A series of Russian policies have already led several of the country’s regional airline carriers to go out of business and threaten to shutter even more. Specifically, Moscow has ended most subsidies to air carriers, closed the vast majority of regional airports, raised fares, and... MORE

Russian propaganda excels at shifting the blame for every one of the country’s problems—even those caused by bad luck, devastating mismanagement, or natural causes—on to the purported main source of all disasters in the world, the United States. In the first hours after the deadly... MORE

The booster malfunction in the third minute of the Soyuz MC-10 rocket launch last Thursday (October 11) avoided tragedy. Though they did not reach orbit, Cosmonaut Aleksei Ovchinin and astronaut Nick Hague landed safely on the ground (TASS, October 11). But it certainly represented another... MORE

Relations between the United States and Russia have continued to deteriorate in 2017 and 2018. In August 2017, US President Donald Trump signed into law a new bill called Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which extended the post-2014 Ukraine sanctions and enlarged their... MORE

Perhaps no failure of Vladimir Putin’s casts a darker shadow on Russia’s future than the decisions he has made that increased Russian dependence on the export of raw materials. This economic reliance is today higher than it was at the time of the 2008 financial... MORE

In late August, the Ukrainian magazine Tizhden published excerpts from a book by the former president of France, François Hollande, Les Leçons de Pouvoir (The Lessons of Power). The passages touch upon Hollande’s impressions of the night of February 11/12, 2015, which he spent in... MORE