In August, a fraud-marred presidential election brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets of Minsk, ushering in weeks of unrest and forcing Belarus’s strongman to solicit Moscow’s grudging support.
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Ever since he came to power in 1994, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has used controlled elections and other levers at his disposal to prolong his own power and to restrain or eliminate rivals -- in some cases literally, according to those who believe he was behind the unsolved disappearances of several opponents.
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Children all over the world have had their education severely disrupted this year, as schools struggle to cope with repeated closures and re-openings, and the transition, if it’s even an option, to online schooling. Disadvantaged children, however, have been worst-hit by the emergency measures. In part three of our look back at the effect that
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Maia Sandu has been sworn in as the new president of Moldova after taking the oath of office on December 24 at a ceremony in Chisinau.
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The outcome of the military conflict in Upper Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia transformed the geopolitical reality in the South Caucasus, with implications for the wider Black Sea-Caspian region. The war demonstrated that power politics is alive and well, and that with great power consent (in this case Russia and Turkey), smaller actors like Azerbaijan
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Russia announced on December 19 that it is returning a centuries-old Orthodox icon that was given to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a visit this week to the Balkans after revelations that it might have been a protected cultural treasure stolen from Ukraine.
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As he does, Russian President Vladimir Putin turned to a Soviet-era pop culture reference to get his message across at one point in his 4 1/2-hour annual press conference on December 17, when responding to the only reporter from a Western country that is not Iceland who got to ask a question.
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought travel around the world to an abrupt halt in 2020. Nations are still trying to grasp the consequences, and restarting movement could take years.
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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Union (EU) are scaling up their support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine (EaP) amid a severe economic downturn resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
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