Publications

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract Europe’s current energy crisis underscores its failure to deal adequately with the problems posed by increasing dependence one Russian gas. Particularly in the Balkans Russia’s oligopolistic position if not monopoly in some...

Poland’s defense budget, currently over two percent of the country’s GDP, is apparently set to grow further. In October 2021, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński announced that his government intended to raise defense spending to “significantly higher” levels....

  Introduction  On October 26, 2021, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense released video of a TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) striking a separatist D-30 howitzer in Russian-occupied Donbas. The strike was Ukraine’s first confirmed use of the now ubiquitous...

It is sometimes said that when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 each still harbored some lingering regret that they were not joining the NATO of 1949 — an alliance with a resolute and single-track focus to deter...

  As the war in Ukraine heads into its eighth year, many fear that Moscow may be preparing a large-scale military escalation. Over the past few weeks, American, European, and NATO allies, as well as Ukrainian officials, have warned...

NATO has wrestled with how to defend its Baltic member states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ever since their accession to the Alliance in 2004. All three militarily weak countries sit uncomfortably close to NATO’s main adversary, Russia. Making...

The US administration under President Joe Biden has been looking to initiate a new round of negotiations with Russia on reducing non-strategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). However, Russia’s willingness to engage remains uncertain, and such negotiations have the potential to...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a monumental vision for his country’s largest city: building a new mega canal through Istanbul. Of course, Istanbul is already home to the Bosporus Strait, whose bisection of Europe and Asia has been...

Autumn is for military exercises. In September two major exercises have occurred in relative close geographic proximity, one in Latvia and the other in western Russia and Belarus. Latvia’s annual large-scale exercise Namejs 2021 kicked off on August 30...

  This report is part of FPRI’s collaboration with Eastern Europe Studies Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania and can also be viewed here   Executive Summary  During the immediate post-Cold War period, the importance of Lithuania, along with other Central-Eastern...