Baltic Sea

It was a chilly spring afternoon in downtown Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Curious passersby crowded around a dozen or so American soldiers, who were displaying their military equipment. While a bit reserved at the beginning, soldiers became much...

On April 3, 2018, the three Baltic presidents—Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania, Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia, and Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia—will meet with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House. This unprecedented quadrilateral Baltic-U.S. presidential summit is the culmination...

“I was a KGB agent,” admitted one of Latvia’s most celebrated poets, Jānis Rokpelnis, in a December 2016 interview. “I confess because it is eating away at my conscience. . . . I have a feeling that I am...

In 1997, when Estonia first began building its digital society through an e-governance system to provide public services online, the general population had limited access to the internet. Twenty years later, the possibilities offered by digital technologies seem...

Since its inception in 2012, China’s “16+1” cooperation platform—an initiative aimed at intensifying Beijing’s economic and cultural ties with 16 countries in Central and Eastern Europe—has attracted great speculation about China’s motives and questions about the format’s concrete deliverables....

In a rural country school in Latgale, a region in eastern Latvia, breaks between classes are noisy with the sounds of students joking, laughing, and playing. In class, they speak Latvian, and in the hallways, they speak Latvian and...

The previous article, The Post-Soviet Wars: Part I, advanced a causal explanation for the post-Soviet wars, the wars that broke out in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To...

On September 11, 2014, a flurry of tweets, a fake Wikipedia page, and photoshopped imagery of CNN news articles spread across the internet to convince Americans that ISIS had attacked a chemical plant in Louisiana. Widespread panic ensued, and...

“Screw the president,” “screw the government,” and “punch the prosecutor in the throat.” These are only three snippets of salacious conversations that took place between Latvian business and political figures. Transcripts of the conversations, which were released in June...