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By Tonda MacCharles January 19th, 2022 Toronto Star Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Print Copy article link Save OTTAWA — The Canadian government says it is ready with further diplomatic and economic sanctions on Russia and more support for Ukraine as part of an intensifying multilateral effort to...

Bulgarians went to the polls three times in 2021 and the summary of the results goes something like this: 6-7 parties in each parliament 4 brand new parties (ITN, IBNI, We Continue the Change, Revival) 3 different election winners (GERB, ITN, We Continue the Change) 2 failed attempts at cabinet form...

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On July 1, I took part in an event co-organized by Chatham House and the Bertelsmann Foundation on Ukraine's crony capitalism. Instead of my usual role as a commentator on Ukrainian judicial reform, I brought in a comparative perspective from Romania and Bulgaria's anticorruption campaigns. I cited ...

Our 2020 article with Daniel Beers, “No Revolution of Dignity for Ukraine’s Judges” received the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Article Prize, awarded for the best article-length work in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture published in English...

I wrote a blogpost, with Prof Nikolay Marinov from University of Houston, for LSE’s EUROPP Blog on the April 2021 Bulgarian parliamentary elections. This was the most unexpected and interesting election in 20 years—read our analysis here....

The Kremlin is transparent in its use of the courts as a PR tool. Alexei Navalny's latest indictment on charges of criminal libel accuses him of insulting a 96 year-old veteran of the Great Patriotic War. The message that this case seeks to communicate to the Russian public is that Navalny doesn't r...

Maria Popova and Mykhailo Zhernakov from Ukraine's DEJURE Foundation published an assessment on judicial reforms under Poroshenko for the German policy outlet, Ukraine-Analysen. Thanks to Fabian Burkhardt for the invitation to share our analysis with a German audience! https://www.laender-analysen.d...

It’s been six months since the avalanche of Covid-spurred school closings, shelter-at-home, and lockdown orders. In March, no one would have predicted that Eastern European governments would be doing as well as they have at tackling the virus. But they have: A) All Eastern Europeans flattened the ...

I recently gave an interview to the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, on the recently concluded criminal case against university student, Yegor Zhukov. 21-year-old Zhukov attracted significant international attention with the closing statement he delivered at his trial on charges that he incite...