Tense political relations with Europe have come into sharp focus in Russian domestic debates, forcing a sudden backtrack. The trigger to the anxiety was the recent (February 4–6) visit to Moscow of Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy,... MORE

Reporting on the saga of Chinese efforts to purchase Ukraine’s strategic Motor Sich aerospace production company frequently casts Kyiv as a weak “pawn” on the geopolitical chessboard, caught in the middle of the larger rivalry between Beijing and Washington. Yet Ukraine is pursuing its own... MORE

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, visited Moscow in person last week (February 5)—still highly unusual during the continuing global COVID-19 pandemic. Borell’s face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, initially aimed at finding ways to reverse the... MORE

On January 25, the government of the Russian Federation adopted a draft version of a bilateral agreement with Belarus on the diversion of some Belarusian refined oil product exports from the Baltic States’ transshipment terminals to Russian seaports (TASS, January 27). At first glance, the... MORE

In November 2016, the Romanian government decided to begin the first national warship-building program since the fall of Communism in 1989. More than four years have passed since this decision was been made, but no ships have been laid yet. The program for building four... MORE

On February 11–12, the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly (ABPA) will gather together 2,700 delegates, including representatives of all levels of executive power in the country, members of the parliament, and directors of Belarus’s largest production units. This ostensibly trendsetting event comes amid new findings regarding shifting... MORE

At the end of last year, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (June 2014–May 2019) announced in an interview that, back in 2018, he had initiated a special operation to detain mercenaries belonging to the notorious Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner Group (News.ru, December 31,... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Kyiv is pinning its hopes on the new administration of United States President Joseph Biden to help rebalance and restart both the Normandy forum and the Minsk Contact Group (see Part One in EDM, February 4). The Minsk... MORE

Moscow and most Russian regions saw a series of huge rallies at the end of January and early February, in which protesters demanded the immediate release of Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Remarkably, on January 23, a crowd of several hundred pro-Navalny demonstrators... MORE

Ukraine is multiplying calls for changing the composition of the “Normandy Four” group (Russia, Germany, France, Ukraine) and its derivative Minsk Contact Group (see below). The Kremlin has effectively used these negotiation forums from 2014 to date in order to conserve, instead of end, its... MORE