Section: Research Organizations & Think Tanks about Ukraine
US Probes Suspected Russian-Backed ‘BlackEnergy’ Attack on Ukraine
Malicious software BlackEnergy, said to have caused massive blackout in Ukraine last month was also used in a 2014 cyberattack on U.S. utilities. …read more Source: Transitions Online...
Ukraine Stops Power Supply to Russian-Annexed Crimea
Shortly before its residents rang in the New Year, the Russian-annexed peninsula of Crimea again found itself entirely without Ukrainian electricity. As in November, this was caused by unidentified saboteurs who blew up a power transmission line tower in Ukraine’s Kherson province, which borders Crimea. However, this time, Kyiv is unlikely...
Tatarstan’s President Defies Kremlin Efforts to Unite Russians against Another Common ‘Enemy’
An unexpected result of Russia’s aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East has been Tatarstan’s opposition to the decision to cut ties with Turkey. After a Turkish F-16 downed a Russian warplane that allegedly crossed from Syria into Turkey’s airspace last November, President Vladimir Putin vowed to punish Ankara for what he...
Russia Decides Who the Terrorists Are
At the end of 2015, an unnamed Kremlin official announced that Moscow was now sharing intelligence about the Islamic State with the Afghan Taliban, even though the Taliban remains on the Russian list of terrorist organizations. Predictably the Taliban denied the assertion (Russianews.net, December 26, 2015). But none of this appears to have been...
The Geopolitics of Cheap Oil
(Image: woodleywonderworks / Flickr) The market was supposed to save the planet. That, at least, was the argument of many economists grappling with the problem of climate change. As fossil fuels became scarcer, they pointed out, the price of oil and natural gas would go up. And then other options, like solar and wind, would become cheaper,...
How Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Sabotaged the Reform Process
Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, was upbeat in his New Year’s message to colleagues. While “2015 was a difficult and responsible year for us all,” he wrote, we “carried out unprecedented reform and overhaul of the prosecutor’s system, bringing it closer to European standards.” Almost thirty...
Russia’s military: Don’t believe the hype.
/ On the photo: The inscription on the stone before the Russian knight, “How to go straight – do not be alive – there is no way any passer or roadway, or flies.” (“Knight at the Crossroads” – a picture of Viktor Vasnetsov, 1882)./ Kyle Mizokami January 4, 2016The Bear is back. Or so the headlines would have you believe. The Russian military, led...
Poland’s Plans to Stick Washington with a Bigger NATO Bill
Doug Bandow Poland’s new nationalist government wants to make a deal with Great Britain: Help us get a NATO—meaning American—garrison, and we’ll agree to limit European migrant flows to Britain. British prime minister David Cameron visited Warsaw in December seeking support for his European Union reform plan, but returned only with a...
A Stubborn Optimist’s 2016 Forecast of World Affairs
Forecasts of the year ahead tend to reflect the general mood of the year before and, for Americans, fears about the world around us. So it’s no surprise that after a most depressing 2015 in geopolitics, doom and gloom dominates 2016 predictions thus far. As if the ongoing civil war in Syria was not bad enough, the self-proclaimed Islamic...
Rollback: Eastern Europe’s Populist Tide
Can a democratic transition be reversed? The lesson of Central Europe since 2008 is a clear and depressing “yes”. The backsliding ranges from the deliberate and systematic demolition of independent institutions and political pluralism in Hungary, to the aggressive actions of Law and Justice in its first weeks in power in Poland, to...
