Ukraine four years after the Maidan
By Steven PiferIn late February 2014, following three months of demonstrations on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), then-President Victor Yanukovych fled the Ukrainian capital on a tortuous path that ultimately took him to Russia. On February 22, 2014, Ukraine’s parliament appointed an acting president and acting...
History Begins (Again) for the Pentagon
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Army. Thanks to a near-myopic obsession with eradicating transnational Islamic terrorism, costly invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a zero-risk approach to...
A Classic Dilemma: Russia’s Threat to Withdraw from the Council of Europe
When Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1996, this was a major step and a sign of a fundamentally new time. The successor state to the Soviet Union joined a pan-European human rights regime that provided the citizens of its member states with effective judicial tools to defend their rights. Today, a good two decades later, Russia’s...
Come to Barcelona to see the hi-tech future now – and Ukraine’s role in it
This year Ukraine marks its fifth year at the Mobile World Congress startup event 4YFN. Sergiy Vakarin, Chairman of UkraineIS and President of Winton Ukraine is proud to announce that several Ukrainian companies will take part in 4YFN and MWC in 2018. Mobile World Congress is the largest telecom event in the world that is […] …read more...
February 20th, 2018
BELARUS Prosecutor Seeks Four-Year Prison Sentence For Belarusian Activist RFE/RL The state prosecutor has asked a Belarusian court to sentence an activist who took part in protests against a law obliging the unemployed to pay taxes on “social parasites” to four years in prison. Svyataslau Baranovich, who was charged with attacking a police...
Ukraine saves Musk’s Martian dream
SpaceX, a private company has successfully launched a new heavy rocket at a fraction of a cost of other similar systems. Falcon Heavy is the world’s most powerful rocket in operation. Its successful launch is an important step towards the goal of sending humans to Mars. Sending large payloads to Mars has been an unresolved […] …read...
Verbal strategies from Kosovo to Crimea. Part Two
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has become a turning point for the Kremlin’s relationship with the West. While inside Russia the event is largely viewed as a “restoration of historical justice,” in the West it is perceived as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and essentially as the first...
Gender equality in Central-Eastern Europe Media
Like all other factors of social life in the region, twenty-eight years after the fall of the Iron Curtain the media landscape in Central Europe remains strongly influenced by its communist past. Media content has become Westernised in the sense that it is more consumption-oriented, which entails objectifying and sexualising bodies – female in...
Putin’s true victory in Syria isn’t over ISIS
By Alina PolyakovaIn December, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory over the Islamic State in Syria. This, of course, was the objective the Kremlin announced in 2015, when Russia first intervened in the country. Yet from the outset, the Russian air campaign primarily hit non-ISIS targets. It soon became clear that Putin’s chief...
Russia condemned for launching ‘machine of wholesale persecution’ in occupied Crimea
On the eve of his 47th birthday, his third in Russian captivity, Crimean Tatar father of four, Muslim Aliev has been declared a political prisoner, together with five other Crimean Muslims, now on trial in Russia. The renowned Memorial Human Rights Centre has given a devastating analysis of the charges Aliev, human rights activist Emir-Usein...
