The top stories on Belarus from the past year collectively tended to feature four major interrelated refrains, listed in descending order of frequency: relations with Russia; the national character, including national identity, collective memory, and a growing sense of the need to defend Belarusian sovereignty;... MORE

In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as Novorossiya; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Putin himself had... MORE

The Moldovan government, controlled by pro-Russian President Igor Dodon, is starting the new year with major economic concerns. A key agenda for officials is to ensure Dodon’s victory in the presidential elections, to be conducted at the end of 2020. To achieve this goal, the... MORE

For Ukraine, the year 2019 was full of sweeping changes. The elite that came to power in the wake of the anti-establishment Maidan uprising in 2014 was swept away in elections won by political amateurs. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former comedian, and his team of young... MORE

Russia is easing into 2020 under expectations of continued economic stagnation and deeper political limbo. And yet, over the previous 12 months, Russia’s foreign policy behavior was rather cautious and passive, as if President Vladimir Putin assumed that global drivers were working in his favor,... MORE

Introduction China’s top annual economic policy gathering, the Central Economic Work Conference (中央经济工作会议, Zhongyang jingji gongzuo huiyi), or CEWC, was held between December 10 and 12 in Beijing. This year’s CEWC focused on the theme of “achieving developmental progress on the basis of first ensuring... MORE

Introduction On July 8, 2019, a group of 22 states issued a joint letter to the 41st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which condemned China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. [1] In... MORE

The Second Central Asian Leaders’ Consultative Summit—involving the five Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—was supposed to take place during the Navruz holiday (March), in the Uzbekistani capital of Tashkent; but it ended up being postponed several times due ostensibly to... MORE

The Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) political-executive body, the Collective Security Council, held a session on November 27–28, in Bishkek, at which Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that member states “must leave orders of [the] Azerbaijani side to acquire new weapons unanswered” (Aysor.am,... MORE

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has marked this year the 25th anniversary of the OSCE’s Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security, 25th anniversary of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances to Ukraine (both pacts adopted at the OSCE’s 1994... MORE