The South Caucasus republic of Georgia is struggling with a plague of brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSB), or Halyomorpha halys. Originally native to East Asia, the BMSB is an agricultural pest that can cause widespread damage to fruit and vegetable crops, particularly when present in... MORE

By finalizing the construction of the Kerch Bridge (see EDM, September 6), Russia is completing its geopolitical project of fully cutting the Crimean Peninsula—which it illegally annexed in March 2014—off from mainland Ukraine. Russia’s chief gains from this effort are first of all to obtain... MORE

While Ukraine’s power plants are short of fuel, coal from the unrecognized Luhansk “people’s republic,” located in the Moscow-proxy-controlled eastern part of Donbas, has been smuggled to Poland, journalists from the Polish newspaper Dziennik have found. Doncoaltrade, a firm linked to Oleksandr Melnychuk, a former... MORE

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, paid an official visit to Uzbekistan in mid-September, highlighting improving relations between Central Asia’s two largest states. There, he met with his Uzbekistani counterpart, Shavkat Mirziyaev, for the sixth time since the latter took office last December, following the... MORE

The Russian government recently announced a hike in excise duties on ga­soline. The overall retail price will increase by more than a ruble per liter (6.5¢/gallon), or by around 2.5 percent of its current market price, by the end of the next year (Ekho Moskvy,... MORE

Despite the multiplicity of major and urgent international crises around the globe, Russia still finds time to invest its political resources in Venezuela’s long-running collapse. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin is meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, today (October 4), in Moscow, to discuss... MORE

On September 20, The Kharkiv City Council sent an appeal, addressed to Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groisman, regarding concerns over recent actions by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Specifically, the appeal cites a draft bulletin allegedly sent by the EASA to the Ukrainian State... MORE

Many countries around the world are now threatened by rising sea levels in coastal areas as a result of climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps. Russia is experiencing such a scenario in the Arctic. But it is also facing another serious... MORE

Ukraine has placed 15-year Eurobonds in the amount of $3 billion, President Petro Poroshenko announced on September 18. Poroshenko, who was on a visit to New York at the time for the United Nations General Assembly, noted that Ukraine had never borrowed so much for... MORE

In the first half of 2017, Belarus’s economy finally overcame its 2.5-year-long downward trend (EurasiaExpert, August 31). Thus, Belarus’s gross domestic product (GDP) has increased 1 percent compared with the first half of 2016. Industrial output increased 6.1 percent and retail sales—0.7 percent. In the... MORE