Black Sea

President Putin’s government’s actions over the past few years have left Russia largely isolated from majority of the rest of the world; certainly from Europe and the U.S. Annexing Crimea in 2014, starting a war in Ukraine’s East, supporting...

The Russia-West relationship saw significant worsening as the Ukraine crisis unfolded in late 2013. After Ukraine’s President Yanukovych backed out of signing the EU Association Agreement, an agreement that was designed to put Ukraine on a path go greater...

Speaking at a November 2011 Valdai roundtable in Krasnogorsk, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously compared the European Union to a hamster, which, having stuffed its cheeks with food—a metaphor for new member-states—now finds itself unable to swallow....

On July 20, investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet was assassinated in Kyiv. Sheremet hosted a morning show at Radio Vesti and was a top reporter atUkrainska Pravda. A crusading journalist and native of Minsk, Belarus, he had already been expelled...

The tenor of NATO’s summit in Warsaw late last week focused overwhelmingly on deterring Russia’s military adventurism. While it was a positive turn for members of the alliance’s eastern flank, such as Poland and the Baltic states, longstanding NATO...

At the recent Georgian Defense and Security Conference, Western policymakers expressed strong support for Georgia’s accession to NATO, and Georgian policymakers reiterated that there was no turning back from their country’s western course. Neither of these statements is necessarily...

Books in Review Thomas J. Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Henry Paulson, Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower (New York: Twelve, 2015)....

Międzymorze is an interwar geopolitical vision conceptualized by the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski (and later adopted by Wladyslaw Sikorski). It is commonly rendered into Latin as Intermarium or "between the seas." The "seas" in Piłsudski's formulation are the endpoints...

Arguably, the most straightforward entree into the world of Georgian geopolitics is the West-Russia tension at the heart of its foreign policy dilemma. Georgia is a former Soviet republic with longstanding cultural, economic and political ties to Russia in...

How are Ukraine’s reforms coming along? It depends who you ask. During a recent visit to Kyiv, I heard a wide range of views. “Reforms are painful, slow, and haven’t passed the tipping point yet,” said Orysia Lutsevych, manager...