Central & Eastern Europe Archive

As observers around the world watched chaos unfold in Paris on Nov. 13, many were struck by the attackers’ use of Kalashnikov assault rifles in the bloodbath. How, given France’s strict gun laws, did the attackers manage to procure military-grade weapons so easily? Where are these heavy weapons coming from? Those same questions were asked in January, when gunmen armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher killed 12 at the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and another armed with a submachine gun and an assault rifle killed four at a kosher supermarket. In 2012, Mohamed Merah […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the impact of corruption and various countries’ efforts to combat it. Last month, the Moldovan Parliament voted to dismiss the government of Prime Minister Valeriu Strelet. The move came weeks after former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, who was also a former leader of the ruling coalition member Liberal Democratic Party, was arrested as part of an investigation into $1 billion that went missing from the country’s banking system.* In an email interview, Balázs Jarábik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, discussed Moldova’s fight against […]

Against the backdrop of Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, Croatia is gearing up for general elections on Sunday, Nov. 8, following one of the shortest campaign periods in its history. They are Croatia’s first parliamentary elections since it joined the European Union in 2013. The ruling coalition, which calls itself Croatia Grows and is run by Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic’s Social Democratic Party (SDP), will face the Patriotic Coalition, anchored by the center-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the former head of Croatia’s internal security agency and Interior Ministry, Tomislav Karamarko. Croatia is just turning the page […]