Balázs Jarábik recently visited Moldova ahead of its crucial parliamentary elections. The country is experiencing growing political polarization: the government, led by the PAS party, retains strong EU backing, while the newly formed Patriotic Bloc is gaining ground by tapping into social discontent—and Russian money. The political center is hollowing out, echoing last year’s presidential race, and with 40% of voters still undecided, the outcome remains uncertain. His backgrounder, explaining why Moldova matters as Ukraine’s soft underbelly and what these dynamics mean for the country’s domestic stability and EU trajectory, was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Essential Ukraine is the bi-monthly flagship publication of Minority Report hosted by R.Politik, offering in-depth analysis of Ukraine's internal political landscape, institutions, and societal transformations. Unlike other services, Essential Ukraine prioritizes depth and realism over frequency, focusing on the structural and societal changes influenced by the ongoing conflict. In the latest seventh edition, examines Ukraine’s efforts to preserve cohesion, manage expectations, and sustain wartime governance in the absence of elections. With Russia maintaining the initiative on multiple fronts and Western engagement increasingly calibrated between support and leverage, the most plausible scenario is one of deferred implementation: Kyiv aims to hold the line, impose costs on Moscow, and wait for the Russian offensive to stall by late autumn without achieving significant gains.
Published on October 23, 2023, by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), this essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War and its broader regional consequences. Two years on, the essay remains strikingly relevant as it anticipated structural dilemmas that now define Ukraine’s battlefield and diplomatic realities in 2025. Jarábik examines the war's origins and argues that the West's understanding of these events remains oversimplified. Break Point shifted focus from a binary “victory or defeat” lens to the long-term consequences of a frozen conflict.
Published by Carnegie’s Russia Eurasia Center on July 15, 2025, this memo follows Balázs Jarábik’s working visit to Chișinău ahead of Moldova’s critical 2025 September parliamentary elections. The analysis highlights rising stakes and growing risks of (self-)deception as Moldova approaches this pivotal vote. While the country’s European Union trajectory is unlikely to reverse, its pace will hinge less on Chișinău’s reform efforts and more on Brussels’ readiness to deepen enlargement. In an increasingly securitized regional environment, the greater threat is not backsliding on reforms but the escalation of domestic tensions triggered by a mishandled electoral process—an opening Russia is well-positioned to exploit.
In his June 18, 2025 analysis for the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia Eurasia Center, Jarábik argues that the European Union must recalibrate its approach to Belarus. He contends that continuing to treat Belarus merely as a moral cause risks rendering the EU irrelevant in a region where leverage, not sentiment, will determine outcomes.Jarábik emphasizes that while Belarus's EU trajectory is unlikely to reverse, its pace will depend more on Brussels' willingness to enlarge than on Minsk's capacity to reform. He warns that in today's securitized regional climate, the real danger lies not in backsliding but in the potential escalation of domestic tensions if the electoral process is mishandled—a vulnerability Russia is well-positioned to exploit.
