Eurasia

Hungary and Poland have plunged Europe into another untimely crisis by vetoing the budget as they look to water down the rule-of-law mechanism governing the distribution of EU funds. Hungary and Poland blocked the €1.82 trillion budget-and-recovery package during a meeting of EU ambassadors (COREPER) on Monday, saying they could …

“As far as I can remember, at least 50 prisoners were killed during the afternoon of November 19, 1991. I witnessed some of these killings.” These are the words of Ivan Gasparovic, one of the few witnesses to the crimes that were committed in the Croatian village of Dalj the …

Bulgaria’s government is talking tough on North Macedonia’s EU ambitions, but analysts and ordinary Bulgarians see it as an electoral ploy and are forging their own connections.

The cases of former Kosovo Liberation Army officials in The Hague should exert pressure on Serbia to prosecute its own former officials for war crimes in Kosovo, says Lotte Leicht of Human Rights Watch.

With the region facing two important elections – in Moldova and Bosnia – and still digesting the implications of the US election, our selection of articles this week ponders the possibilities of continuity or change in more than one way.

Three decades on, it is still not known what happened to dozens of Kosovo Albanian conscript soldiers who went missing while serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. Muhamet Gashi remembers that it was a rainy day on June 30, 1991 when his son Vesel …

Some of the Romanian men and women who have served under NATO in Afghanistan tell BIRN why they went and what it was like.It began with 265 soldiers and 15 medics. Almost 19 years later, Romania’s participation in NATO’s mission in Afghanistan has grown to 693 troops, making the former …

No longer the supreme jihadist group, al-Qaeda has seen other outfits grow and has sometimes clashed with them on the ground. The reported deaths of al-Qaeda’s top two leaders in recent months have raised questions about the future strategy and strength of the terror network, already a shadow of the …

In recent months, “Islamic State” extremists have been demanding tax payments from residents of towns and villages in eastern Syria. Clashes in the Syrian desert between Russia-backed Syrian government forces and “Islamic State” (ISIS) group extremists killed 11 regime loyalists Wednesday, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a Britain-based …

The Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, a Washington think tank recently published, in partnership with NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, the study entitled “NATO 20/2020: twenty bold ideas to re-imagine the Alliance after the US elections of 2020 “. According to the drafters, the document would aim to revitalize public …