Following the important victory of Maia Sandu against Igor Dodon in the runoff of the presidential elections on the November 12, 2020 the mandate of the president-elect faces major challenges, both domestic and foreign. Moldovan citizens and the Western partners of the Republic of Moldova expect the new administration to adopt sustainable reforms, combat corruption, develop the economy, recalibrate the relation with the Russian Federation, and, at the same time, intensify the democratisation and Europeanisation process.

For almost three years, the Hungarian government has sought to instrumentalize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and some European Union institutions to pressure Ukraine into legislating certain entitlements for the Hungarian national community in Carpathian Ukraine.
Kyiv and Budapest have initiated an effort to resolve their differences over the impact of Ukrainian language and education laws on the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine’s Carpathian province.

Ukraine’s ethnic-Bulgarian minority is concentrated in the southwestern part of Ukraine’s Odesa province, an area often if somewhat inaccurately referenced as “Bessarabia.” It forms a triangle between the Dnister/Nistru River, the Danube Estuary and the Black Sea, adjacent to the Russian-controlled Transnistria, and bordering on Moldova and Romania. This triangular area holds pivotal strategic significance in the region.

The parliament of Bulgaria has adopted a declaration criticizing Ukraine’s policy toward the Bulgarian minority in Odesa province. This move might seem to indicate that Bulgaria is about to emulate Hungary or Romania, each of which, in its own way (Hungary more persistently and harshly), has in recent years criticized Ukraine’s policies toward the Hungarian and Romanian minorities, respectively.

Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has accepted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to chair the Executive Committee of Ukraine’s National Council for Reforms (Ukrinform, May 7). Taking up the new challenge, Saakashvili promised to draw on the experience of his universally recognized achievements in Georgia (which inspired this new appointment in Ukraine) “but also to draw on the experience of my defeats” (Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, May 8).

Coronavirus pandemic, falling oil prices and the approaching global economic crisis may affect the course of the negotiations to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

In the wake of last month’s (December 2019) “Normandy” summit (see EDM, December 11, 12, 2019), and awaiting the same forum’s April 2020 top-level meeting, Ukrainian officials are airing proposals to revise the Kremlin-imposed Minsk “accords” of 2014 and 2015. The “accords,” designed to legalize Russia’s control of the Donetsk-Luhansk territory and to disrupt Ukraine farther afield, remain unimplemented to date thanks to the previous Ukrainian government’s successful maneuvering and stalling. That work has made it possible for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration now to call for revising the Minsk “accords.”

At the end of the second millennium of its Christian history, Europe has changed.
After a nearly half-century long grim battle, communism abandoned the place, and suddenly vanished like an ugly nightmare at sunrise.
And capitalism has returned.

A ticking clock and a shutting trap seem appropriate metaphors for the predicament of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his team hoping against hope for “peace” with Russia.

In his annual press conference, summing up the year just past (Kremlin.ru, December 19, 2019), Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned Ukraine’s title to the territory that Russian nationalists reference as Novorossiya; and he cast an irredentist glance at central Ukraine as well. Putin himself had launched a short-lived Novorossiya project in 2014, aiming at that time to create a Russian protectorate out of eight Ukrainian provinces, six of them along the Black Sea coast.