Ukraine badly needs external aid from western donors, but that money should be spent well. An international donor conference is in the air, and the European Union proposed an aid package of around €11 billion, which can be deployed in the long term in cooperation with various other financial institutions in Ukraine. Even more important than the quantity is the quality of the aid. The situation in Ukraine is not so exceptional that past lessons are irrelevant.

The Russian intervention in Crimea showed that Moscow is willing to use its armed forces to achieve its strategic goal of preventing Ukraine and other Eastern Partnership countries from deepening their integration with the European Union. Previously, the instruments the Kremlin used to achieve this goal were limited to political and economic pressures. In particular, Moldova is worth examining.

Mordor Will Come and Eat Us: A Confidential History of the Slavs. By: Ziemowit Szczerek. Korporacja Ha!art Poland, 2013.

When Martin Scorsese appeared at the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre on Targowa Street in Łódź on December 11th 2011 to receive an honorary doctorate from Robert Gliński, the school’s rector, the joy of the university’s staff and students as well as that of both the national and municipal authorities and the whole world of Polish cinema was great. Nobody then predicted that this was only the beginning of the American director’s romance with Polish Film.

First in Spodek, a spectacular place in Katowice, and last week in Gliwice there were raised Ukrainian flags. This is all we can do in this inconceivable situation. “Let’s call things by name and things will change” are the words of a song. International law was violated and part of a sovereign nation – no longer one of the Soviet republics, although that is how Russia has treated Ukraine – was attacked.

Conflicts of memory belong to the key problems of the present day. It is an area debated by politicians, historians, sociologists, artists, writers, and museum experts… Protecting memory and disputing memory are often inseparable from each other.

The primary focus on the current, tense military situation in Crimea has been on the deployment of conventional Russian forces to the region and the mobilisation of the Ukrainian uniformed services in reaction to this. At this point, this is the most visible and tangible facet of the current security crisis. A dangerous and little-discussed aspect of the current standoff, however, is the spectre of nuclear weapons in the current imbroglio.

In his famous book Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard has written that in the modern world, information “rather than creating communication, exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning”.

The conference "The Caucasian Knot: The Contemporary Problems and Challenges of the Region", held in Poznań on April 11th-12th is aimed at students, PhD students and researchers interested in the broader issue of the Caucasus region. The conference will be summarized by plenary lectures delivered by Caucasus experts.

Ending a few months of speculation at the end of an unusually warm January 2014, Serbia’s ruling SNS (Srpska napredna stranka – Serbian Progressive Party) announced that it will call for early parliamentary elections in Serbia, just a year and a half after it had formed a government. The decision froze its relations with SPS (Socijalistička partija Srbije – Socialist Party of Serbia), which had formed the government together with SNS.