As NATO has focused its attention on Russia’s offensive military capabilities in Eastern Europe, an equally significant and, in practice, more problematic issue has been largely ignored: Russia’s preponderance of “anti-access, area-denial” capabilities in the borderlands between the Baltic and Black Seas. Is NATO focusing on the wrong Russian threat in Eastern Europe? This week, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Announced by President Donald Trump last weekend, the move comes after repeated Russian violations […]
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Almost exactly one year ago, Poland’s celebration of its national Independence Day turned into a festival of extremism, filling the streets of Warsaw with throngs of flare-burning demonstrators chanting racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and homophobic slogans. At the time, I wrote that Poland risked becoming the European capital of xenophobia, unless its government and its people made a deliberate decision to counteract the troubling tolerance for right-wing radicals. Just weeks before this year’s Nov. 11 holiday, Poles voted in regional elections that were the first electoral test for the ruling Law and Justice party, or PiS, in three years. The results […]
The headlines coming out of Latvia’s Oct. 6 parliamentary elections suggested that, as elsewhere in the world, populism is on the rise in the small Baltic nation. The anti-establishment KPV LV party was one of the big winners, along with the pro-Russian Harmony party. But in Latvia’s fragmented political system, no party is guaranteed a spot in the ruling coalition. Agnia Grigas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of “The Politics of Energy and Memory between the Baltic States and Russia,” among other books, breaks down the election results in an email interview with WPR. […]
Last month, the European Parliament took the unusual step of formally censuring a member state, voting by a wide margin to condemn Hungary under far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a “systemic threat to the rule of law” and trigger the Article 7 process of the Lisbon Treaty that could suspend its EU voting rights. The vote followed a report from the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs warning that the Hungarian government was abusing the rights of asylum-seekers, migrants and women and restricting freedom of the press, while it permitted corruption and suffered from a […]
History has indelibly branded the Balkans as the battleground of empires, a fault line where great powers clash. That pattern came into full view again this weekend, when Macedonians voted in a referendum on whether or not to change their country’s name in order to ease its accession into the European Union and NATO, a question that has drawn the interest and involvement of Russia. The referendum yielded a head-snapping outcome. First, the returns showed overwhelming approval, with some 90 percent voting to change the country’s name. But then the tally showed that voter turnout was just 36 percent, well […]