Section: The Centre for Eastern Studies (Poland)
Pre-election gambit: Gazprom’s offer to Ukraine
On 22 March a meeting took place in Moscow between the Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev and the chairman of Gazprom Aleksei Miller and the pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians Viktor Medvedchuk and Yuri Boyko (the latter is a candidate in the presidential elections in Ukraine. The Russian side declared its readiness to sign a new contract for...
Serving politics. Television’s role in Ukraine’s presidential election
Television plays a major role in the formation of public opinion in Ukraine. For 85% of the population, it represents their main source of information. By providing information about candidates in an election, their manifestos, and events surrounding election campaigns, television stations have a fundamental impact on the popularity of individual...
Hungary’s response to the offer to improve US-Hungarian relations
On 11 February, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo travelled to Budapest as part of his trip to Europe. This was the first visit of a US Secretary of State to Hungary since 2011. Pompeo met with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the minister of Foreign Affairs and the minister of Defence. The main subjects of the talks were Hungarian-US relations,...
Everything is possible: Ukraine two months before the presidential election
4 February was the deadline for candidates in the presidential elections scheduled for 31 March to submit their applications to the Central Election Commission. The three favourites are: comedian and television producer Volodymyr Zelenskiy, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the incumbent president Petro Poroshenko. …read more...
A ‘last-minute’ transit contract? Russia-Ukraine-EU gas talks
On 21 January another round of trilateral gas talks between Russia, Ukraine and the European Union was held in Brussels. This meeting mainly concerned the new Russian-Ukrainian transit contract; the transit contract currently in force between Gazprom and Naftogaz will expire as of 1 January 2020. During the meeting, European Commission...
Zelenskiy: a comedian joins the race for the presidency of Ukraine
30 December 2018 saw the official launch of the campaign for Ukraine’s presidential elections scheduled for 31 March. Candidates can submit their documents to the Central Electoral Commission by 4 February. So far, several candidates have publicly announced their intention to run for the highest office in the land, including Volodymyr...
NATO‘s Northeast Quartet: Prospects and Opportunities for Baltic-Polish Defence Cooperation
For quite some time, territorial defence seemed to be an obsolete need, a leftover from the Cold War era. However, Russia’s overt and covert uses of military force—against Georgia in 2008 and against Ukraine since 2014—have profoundly altered the security environment and threat perceptions in the region and, indeed, across the entire...
The Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea: the military aspects
On 24 November, a group of ships of the Ukrainian Navy, composed of two armoured artillery boats, the Berdyansk and the Nikopol (newly-constructed Giurza M-type units, which have been in service since 2016 and 2018 respectively) and the tugboat Yana Kapu (in service since 1974), left Odessa under instructions to join the vessels which have been...
Martial law in ten regions of Ukraine
After a heated discussion, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law during an extraordinary session late in the evening of 26 November approving a decree by President Petro Poroshenko introducing martial law for 30 days (from 9am on 28 November) in ten regions located along the border of Russia, the coasts of the Azov Sea and the Black Sea, and...
Consequences of the incident in the Sea of Azov
Before midnight on 25 November, President Petro Poroshenko issued a decree at the request of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine to introduce martial law for a period of 60 days, while announcing that a general mobilisation will not be declared and civil liberties will not be restricted (the full text of the decree regulating the...
