Black Sea

On October 28, Georgia held a presidential election that is now set to have a runoff. The Georgian Dream (GD), the governing party, supported independent candidate Salome Zurabishvili, who received 38.63% of the vote, while the United National Movement’s...

The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia shocked most of the world but was quickly overshadowed by other events. The 2008 financial crisis, which began around the same time, seized the attention of governments as they tried to...

Since 1945, the United States has promoted European economic, political, and energy integration, and one recent way it has promoted these goals is by supporting the Three Seas Summit and Business Forum, which took place in Bucharest, Romania, on...

Russia and Ukraine have spent the last four years locked in a conflict with many fronts, from the battlefields of Donbas to the servers of Ukrainian businesses. This paper will examine one under-studied front: the dispute between Russia and...

In August 2015, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense officially launched a comprehensive effort to overhaul the country’s armed forces as conflict razed through the country’s Donbas region. Three years later, fighting capabilities have reached their highest levels since independence...

This spring, Georgia marked—with understandable pride—the centennial of the first democratic republic founded on May 26, 1918. This brief, but shining, moment in the nation’s history, the beginning of a three-year period between its occupation by Czarist Russia and...

Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the President the power to negotiate alliances with the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”  Presidents made limited use of that power in the first century and a half of...

In November 2017, the European Union Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit in Brussels culminated in the signing of the Comprehensive and Enlarged Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between the EU and Armenia. The CEPA ended a four-year limbo that emerged after Armenia...

The Black Sea region in recent years has been marked both by sharp shifts and by intractable dilemmas. The biggest shift is Russia, which has expanded its military role throughout the broader Black Sea region even as it stumbles...

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...