Central & Eastern Europe Archive

Russia kicked off much-anticipated military exercises this week involving either 12,700 troops—the upper limit to avoid a treaty-required NATO observation mission—or more than 100,000, depending on whether you believe the Kremlin or NATO officials. The live-fire Zapad 2017, or West 2017, exercises, conducted jointly with Belarus, portray a conflict with unidentified Western forces in a scenario that, again, is either a defensive operation or an invasion, depending on who you believe. In either case, despite an almost deadly missile misfire, the drills are being rightly billed as a showcase for Russia’s decade-long military modernization initiative. Launched following the disappointing performance […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about education policy in various countries around the world. For many years, the issue of language has been a persistent point of social tension inside Ukraine, as the country contends with the nature of its relationship to Russia. After long downplaying the matter, Ukraine’s parliament brought it front and center last week with a new law that restricts the teaching of Russian and other minority languages in schools—eliciting outcries in capitals from Moscow to Budapest. In an email interview, Nicolai Petro, the Silvia-Chandley Chair in Peace and Nonviolence at the […]

Serbia’s short-lived withdrawal of all of its diplomats from neighboring Macedonia in late August, following a narrowly avoided regional trade war, brought the timeworn phrase “Balkan tensions” back into the news yet again. Both events are a sign of how strained international relations in the Balkans can still be, and of the difficulties that lie ahead as the region’s countries look to integrate into the European Union—and with one another. However dramatic, the spat between Serbia and Macedonia was quickly smoothed over, at least on the surface. Serbian diplomatic staff returned to their embassy in Skopje four days after they […]