New Eastern Europe

The five human rights defenders represent some of Belarus’s best-known voices for human rights. For years, their imprisonment was emblematic of the Belarusian authorities’ sweeping crackdown on independent civil society and the human rights movement following the 2020 elections. While they have been released from prison, freedom remains complicated. Forced into exile and stil...

In 2024, Boris Nadezhdin was Russia’s only anti-war presidential candidate, but he was barred from the election on the grounds that some of the signatures he had submitted were invalid.

In June 2026, he said he intended to stand in the State Duma elections scheduled for September. On July 10th, Russia’s Ministry of Justice declared him a “foreign agent”, a...

Ukrainians typically conceive of the war against Russia as one fought on behalf of all of democratic Europe. Indeed, since Moscow’s 2022 invasion, Ukrainian, European, and American policy-makers have regularly framed the war as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Yet, there is an increasingly notable exception to this rule: Kyiv’s productive relationship with h...

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In 2026, this magazine commemorates its 15th year of publishing. Our first issue, released in October 2011, which now seems like a lifetime ago, announced that New Eastern Europe was established to present readers with provocative texts, in-depth analyses, and stimulating reports from the countries that belong to what we then called Eastern Europe. We were convinced ...