The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has already deepened conflicts elsewhere, including Europe, where a confrontation is escalating between Belarus and its European Union neighbours: Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Even before the meltdown in Kabul, Belarusian …
In July, Donald Tusk, the former European Council president who served as Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, returned to Polish politics. Many voters remember him as the politician who raised the country’s retirement …
Former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has come back to where he started, reclaiming his position as head of Civic Platform (PO), the party that he led to electoral victories in 2007 and 2011, before …
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has once again demonstrated the lengths to which he will go to crack down on his opponents. On 23 May, he deployed a MiG-29 fighter jet to force down a commercial …
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent annual address on the state of his country was so ostentatiously threatening as to sound reassuring. Not only did he forbid the West from crossing red lines, but he announced …
US President Joe Biden is very familiar with both Poland and Ukraine. His decades of service as a United States senator and his eight years as vice president under Barack Obama taught him that the …
The biggest wave of protests in years has swept Russia, raising hopes that popular pressure will persist and intensify, gradually eroding an autocratic regime, as is happening in neighbouring Belarus. But we should be wary …
Joe Biden’s election as president of the United States has seriously weakened authoritarian and populist governments around the world. For independent global powers like Russia, Brazil and Turkey, Donald Trump’s departure need not amount to …
Authoritarian political leaders in neighbouring Poland and Belarus have tested the limits of public tolerance in recent months. In both countries, they have provoked mass demonstrations. And in both cases, women have been in the …
Belarusian university students marked the start of the academic year on 1 September by announcing a strike. They planned to gather in Victory Square and then march to the Ministry of Education, where they would …
Things are not going Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s way. Since the fraudulent presidential election on 9 August, the security services have been trying to carry out Lukashenko’s order to end the peaceful protests against his …
After weeks of nationwide protests over a fraudulent election on 9 August, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko seems to have realised that he has lost popular support for good. His last resort is to radicalise his …
