Curated playlist
Post-Soviet states
- MoldovaMoldova is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of 33,843 square kilometres and a population of about 2.38 million people. It is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. Yet a strip of its…
- Satellite stateA satellite state has been part of the English language since as early as 1780, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That is decades before the Cold War made the phrase famous. The term was coined by analogy to astronomy, comparing…
- AbkhaziaAbkhazia covers 8,665 square kilometres on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, yet most of the world does not recognise it exists as a country. Five UN member states call it an independent republic. The rest of the international community…
- South OssetiaSouth Ossetia sits in a narrow fold of the Caucasus Mountains, covering just 3,900 square kilometres and home to just over 56,500 people. Yet this small territory has been a flashpoint for wars, a bone of contention between Russia and…
- Republics of the Soviet UnionThe Republics of the Soviet Union were described in the 1977 constitution as "sovereign Soviet socialist states" that had freely chosen to unite into one great union. That phrase, sovereign, was a legal fiction that kept the whole…
- Shock therapy (economics)Shock therapy, in economics, is a policy package designed to transform an economy overnight. In theory, the idea is simple: rip out price controls, privatize state industries, and let markets emerge where once there were none. In practice,…
- Post-Soviet statesThe Post-Soviet states came into existence on the 26th of December 1991, the day the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen countries emerged from that dissolution, stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Uzbekistan on the…
- Commonwealth of Independent StatesThe Commonwealth of Independent States came into existence on the 8th of December 1991, born inside a forest reserve roughly 50 kilometres north of Brest, Belarus. Three men met at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Natural Reserve and signed a…
- Eurasian Economic UnionThe Eurasian Economic Union was born on the 1st of January 2015, but its founding idea was spoken aloud more than two decades earlier by a single man standing at a podium at Moscow State University. On the 29th of March 1994, Nursultan…
- UkraineUkraine covers 603,628 square kilometres of Eastern Europe, making it the second-largest country on the continent after Russia. It holds a population estimated at 32.3 million in 2026, a figure that has fallen dramatically from a peak of…