While the media focuse on the Kremlin’s “hybrid warfare” against the Western democracies or the Chinese social credit system controlling people’s everyday life through mass-surveillance, the illiberal state of Viktor Orbán is also doing its fair share to exercise information control via new digital powers.
Unsurprisingly, among the countries with the most substantial deteriorations in freedom in recent years are Turkey and Poland, both experiencing evident weakening of the rule of law, contracting religious freedom, and attacks on freedom of expression.
We commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an event that in many respects showed to the whole world the desperation of people struggling for self-determination under totalitarian regimes.
Estonia, Finland, and the Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel together with Rail Baltic have a potentially important role in the new global connection between Europe and Asia. The Norwegian experts have calculated that the distance between Shanghai and Hamburg is 12 277 nautical miles, a voyage time of 39 days.
We are entering a new era of influence operations in the cyber space. As global players such as Twitter and Google are joining the fight against the spread of hostile propaganda, Kremlin friendly trolls have no trouble adjusting to the new cyber rules and still keeping their activities one step ahead.
The two potential coalition parties (the ANO movement and the Social Democrats) have finally reached the consensus on how the country should look like under their second term of governance. But the fate of the coalition will be decided similarly as in Germany – by social democrats’ internal referendum.
The end of February 2018 was marked by the victory celebration at the Ukrainian gas market as Ukrainian Naftogaz won the case on gas transit against the Russian Gazprom at the Stockholm Arbitrage Court. The Gazprom has to pay the Naftogaz USD 4.6 bn for violating the “take or pay” clause.
In 2015, Polish reporter Tomasz Grzywaczewski embarked on a journey to the ghost republics that span from Donbas to Abkhazia, to South Ossetia, and to mountainous Karabakh. What he saw in the shadows of ongoing conflicts is that there is still life and people who dream of peace.
The year 2017 brought wins and failures. The Ukrainian Government was able to approve important reforms, which was still not sufficient to receive scheduled assistance from the IMF and the EU. 2018 will be tough as Ukraine should make large progress in many areas, while the 2019 elections are approaching.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has by decree named a regiment of the Russian air force after the Estonian capital, Tallinn. In the former Soviet republic this has been regarded as a provocation, with good reason.
