Our next anniversary guest post is written by the the great Jonathan Edelstein.
It’s starting to look like the season of referenda in the near abroad.
On September 17, less than a week from today, voters in the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, located between Moldova and Ukraine, will be asked to vote on whether to “renounce [their] [...]

Viktor and Yulia, together again.
April 6 (Bloomberg) — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party will team up in parliament with an alliance led by former premier Yulia Timoshenko and the Socialists, said Our Ukraine spokesman Valentyn Mondrievsky.
The Regions Party, led by Viktor Yanukovych, which won the most votes in March 26 elections, will [...]

Want to know what’s happening in the Belarus civil war? Belarus Today’s yer blog. Except, of course, it’s not. As it says at the bottom of the page:
This website is part of a foreign policy simulation. The events depicted are not actually taking place.
Thank God for that. After all, by the end of the [...]

Little known Moldova has been in the news at Afoe recently (here, and here), and today the story continues:
Russia’s use of energy as a political tool was in the spotlight again on Wednesday as the European Union expressed concern about Moscow’s dispute with Moldova over gas prices…….On Wednesday the European Commission urged Russia and Moldova [...]

Expanding on (and slightly copying) my comments in Edward’s post below, I was really shocked to see the spin in the western coverage of the Ukrainian gas crisis. The part that didn’t shock me - just made me groan - is the spin of a western press that seems to have decided in advance [...]

Over at TYR, I argued that the explanation of the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute was an effort by the Russian side to break up the European gas customers as a negotiating block by exploiting the conflict between the transit states (like the Ukraine) and the customers (like Germany). This gave rise to further discussion down-blog right [...]

So the long-running Russia-Ukraine gas crisis is finally over. It was only the day before yesterday that it got going wasn’t it? The Ukraine will pay Russia an agreed price of $230 per 1,000 cubic metres. More interesting is what is in the fine print:

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The big news today I suppose is that Ukraine has just received a mid-winter present: someone turned off the gas. The issue here seems to be not the what but the how. Ukraine has been receiving gas at incredibly subsidised rates from Russia, and there is no good reason why this should continue indefinitely. But [...]

In late October, Ukraine re-privatized its Kryvorizhstal steel works in a live auction watched, apparently, by millions on television. The action was a reversal of the privatization that had taken place under the previous government. The old sale would have brought in $800 million. The new sale, to Mittal Steel Germany GmbH, will net $4.8 [...]

When we last looked in, Viktor Yushchenko had been inaugurated, Viktor Yanukovych had grudgingly conceded, and orange was the color for all would-be world-changers.
Unfortunately, while we weren’t looking, Ukraine’s cabinet was collapsing into in-fighting and neglecting to do the things that people put them in office for. On the positive side, an investigation into the [...]