2016 promises to be a decisive year for Ukraine. The sudden resignation on 3 February of Economics Minister Aivaras Abromavicius – and the immediate sharp fall of Ukraine’s sovereign bonds – suggest that the showdown is at hand, much sooner…
Will Ukraine Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
Kiev has won an improbable victory by holding Russia’s military behemoth to a stalemate in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s undeclared war on Ukraine. After a year of intensive shelling during a poorly observed truce in the Donbas, the big guns…
A Useful Stalemate in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s undeclared war on once-fraternal Ukraine has destroyed Moscow’s influence on Kiev, forged genuine Ukrainian identity in resistance and ended in a roughly stable stalemate in the eastern 3% of Ukraine that Russia now controls. However bitter…
Serbia Reinvents Itself
Back in the 1990s, Ivica Dacic, known as ‘Little Slobo’, was the spokesman who justified strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s conquests of neighbouring non-Serbs in the Balkan wars. Aleksandar Vucic, as the information minister of Yugoslav President Milosevic, was the hatchet man…