*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Recent statements by the United States—namely, the White House and the State Department—reveal the misunderstanding and/or improper use of the vocabulary related to Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Biden administration is... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. The Joseph Biden administration has recently learned the Russian MinskSpeak, chapter and verse. Following direct discussions with Moscow (see EDM, October 20, December 8, 9, 14), the White House and State Department have adopted key parts of Russia’s... MORE

Russia imposed the Minsk “agreements” on Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 through military force. Ukraine’s government and civil society regard the terms of those documents as inimical to the national interests. They spent these seven years resisting, evading, and asking to change those terms. Throughout... MORE

Presidents Joseph Biden of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia have agreed, in their December 7 video-dialogue (see EDM, December 8), to create working groups that would address Russia’s concerns regarding Ukraine’s place in the European security order. Those concerns directly relate to... MORE

Presidents Joseph Biden of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia held a one-on-one video-conference, on December 7—their fifth direct dialogue (three by telephone, one in person, one by video) in the ten months since Biden took office. The US President initiated both the... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. While Kyiv, Berlin and Paris pursue (with varying degrees of intensity, frantically in Kyiv’s case) a high-level “Normandy” meeting as a goal for its own sake, without conditions or a clear agenda, Moscow is setting maximalist conditions for... MORE

Russian diplomacy is testing its rogue-state practices on its Western diplomatic counterparts, and finds them malleable. On November 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov unilaterally publicized the confidential messages recently exchanged between himself and his German and French counterparts, Heiko Maas and Jean-Yves Le Drian,... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Moldova’s natural gas market has become physically accessible to non-Russian gas suppliers through the Romania-Moldova interconnector, the Iasi–Ungheni–Chisinau pipeline. Built and operated by Romanian Transgaz and declared operational as of October this year after long delays, the interconnector... MORE

The Republic of Moldova presents a unique combination of economic and political vulnerabilities to Russian energy servitude. The Kremlin has underscored this situation by hitting Moldova’s recently elected, Western-oriented government with a natural gas supply crisis on the cusp of winter. Russia’s gas export monopoly,... MORE

On October 29, Moscow and Chisinau agreed on a conditional resumption of Russian natural gas supplies to Moldova as of October 30. The Russian side had curtailed gas supplies to Moldova by one third in October, and threatened to discontinue the supplies altogether by December... MORE