Eurasia

“The champion of our petrochemical industry.” So boasted Todor Zhivkov, then-communist leader of Bulgaria, when the country’s first oil refinery at Burgas on the Black Sea coast launched operations in 1963. Nearly six decades later, Bulgaria’s planned economy may be long gone, but the so-called champion continues refining oil into …

Poland has declared its ambition to become the strongest military power in Central Europe. A NATO spending-leader already, Warsaw is eying a two-fold expansion of its armed forces, even though this will entail huge costs and defy demographic trends. Can it succeed? Tons of heavy armour will soon be rolling …

For many, Kazakhstan and Ukraine may appear to be “typical post-Soviet countries,” Vladislav Inozemtsev says. But the strategies they have adopted and the results they have achieved are radically different, with Kazakhstan’s approach far more successful than Ukraine’s in escaping from the orbit of the Soviet past. Kazakhstan’s leaders promoted …

Russia seeks to restore its former position in the world and has repeatedly shown under Putin that it has the ability to destabilize international order. While Russia lacks the military power to challenge the United States’ superiority, Europe does not underestimate its capabilities. Moscow’s use of arms sales and military …

Ladies and gentlemen, friends, Let me start by thanking the Atlantic Council for providing a fitting venue to discuss central banks’ forays into Digital Currencies. Since its founding in 1961, the Council has made important contributions to strategic, political, and economic policy debates. Those debates have served us well, helping …

Among EU countries, perhaps no issue is as divisive as “energy policy”. In Europe, every country now has its own strategy for fossil energy, nuclear energy and renewable energy to meet their national interest. From France, which gets more than 50 percent of its energy from nuclear fission, to Germany, …

Events of the first decade of new 2022 year in Kazakhstan clearly showed not only that the power of systemic social and political destabilizing has not extinguished yet, but also that such destructive processes got new features tailored to the country, where they have been launched. It should be noted …

After more than a decade of subdued consumer price inflation despite gigantic monetary and fiscal stimuli, last year’s surge in consumer prices took most central banks by surprise. First, they tried to dismiss it as “transitory” and caused by pandemic-related supply bottlenecks. Within a few months, when wages started rising …

The widespread violent unrest in Kazakhstan and subsequent arrival of mostly Russian troops who helped restore order last month exposed a further contest of rivals for power there between its ostensibly friendly neighbors, Russia and China. One also might wonder if Russia was taking advantage of the crisis of the …

Where is the outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations? When an Arab country subjects Palestinians to actual apartheid measures, the international community is too busy lying about Israel’s alleged abuses to take notice. “It is estimated that 65% of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live under the …