Крымские заложники Кремля
Russia / Europe В конце октября Владимир Путин помиловал и освободил Ильми Умерова и Ахтема Чийгоза – двух крымскотатарских диссидентов и членов Меджлиса крымскотатарского народа. Оба преследовались за свою позицию: они открыто заявляли, что произошел акт агрессии и аннексии Крыма Российской Федерацией и призывали к возвращению украинского...
Arms control, security cooperation, and U.S.-Russian relations
By Steven PiferFor nearly 50 years, arms control agreements have contributed to more stable and predictable relations between Washington and Moscow. Beginning in the late 1980s, agreements such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty followed by the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) went beyond mere limitations to...
Mixed Results for Emerging Europe in Legatum Prosperity Index
World prosperity increased in 2017 and now sits at its highest level in the last decade, being 2.6 per cent higher than in 2007, according to the 11th edition of the Legatum Prosperity Index. However, the gap between the highest and lowest scores has increased and the spread between nations is growing. Each country has been measured on nine...
Isolationism is Not an Option
Editor’s Note: This blog is part of an ongoing series of contributions from participants in The German Marshall Fund’s flagship leadership development program, The Marshall Memorial Fellowship (MMF). I received a typical American education. In high school, I was taught that the United States’ love of isolationism was a root...
Council of Europe will betray its human rights mandate by giving in to Russia, Mr Jagland
The Council of Europe is considering reinstating Russia’s voting rights which were withdrawn after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Crimea remains under occupation with ever-mounting human rights abuse, making the reference given to the Council of Europe’s ‘human rights mandate’ as excuse for removing...
Germany: Keeping an Eye on the Balkans
By Antonia Colibasanu Germany’s foreign intelligence agency is increasingly turning its attention to the Balkans, according to a report by German newspaper Berliner Zeitung. The agency, the BND, has not confirmed the story, but the media rarely report on the BND’s work. That they did in this case could indicate that the agency wants...
CERN quantum computing experiments and Ukrainian scientific co-authoring project to boost R&D effectiveness
Last week a delegation of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) visited Kyiv. The former CERN Director Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the one who announced the winning discovery of the Higgs boson (the authors received a Nobel prize later), opened the CERN in Images exhibition in Ukraine. UkraineIS has obtained the high-resolution copies of...
Poland’s right-wing government poised to seize more control of the judiciary than Yanukovych achieved in Ukraine
Poland’s ruling party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS] is set to gain effective control over the National Council of the Judiciary and influence over all judicial appointments in the country. Many of their moves seem ominously reminiscent of the methods used to gain control – and he hoped, to maintain it, by Ukraine’s ex-President...
Beyond Zapad 2017: Russia’s Destabilizing Approach to Military Exercises
The world can be relieved that Russia did not use this fall’s Zapad 2017 military exercise as a pretext for aggression or to permanently base troops in Belarus, as many analysts feared before the event. Much has been written about the exercise, most of it focusing on competing claims regarding its size and purpose. What has received less...
The Duplicitous Superpower
Ted Galen Carpenter For any country, the foundation of successful diplomacy is a reputation for credibility and reliability. Governments are wary of concluding agreements with a negotiating partner that violates existing commitments and has a record of duplicity. Recent U.S. administrations have ignored that principle, and their actions have...
