DEAR READER,
Last Friday, our publisher, the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe (KEW), turned 25. We celebrated at our headquarters in Wojnowice, near Wrocław (which is located in a 14th century castle), and we were delighted to see so many friends and partners make the trip. Thank you for coming!
The timing is a happy one, because New Eastern Europe is also marking 15 years of independent, English-language reporting and analysis on Central and Eastern Europe. We could not have done it without our readers.
If Brief Eastern Europe is part of your Monday routine, please consider supporting the work behind it. New Eastern Europe membership starts at €35 and gives you full access to our digital archive, while helping us stay independent. Become a member by clicking this link!
Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!
— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor
TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK
🇺🇦 Russian drones strike central Kyiv. A Russian drone hit the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv’s central Shevchenkivskyi district on September 28, killing a woman and setting the building on fire, while other strikes hit a pharmaceutical company and gas stations in the capital. The Russian aerial assault killed three people and wounded at least 12 when a drone struck an office centre in Dnipro, while 43 people, including 11 children, were injured in a strike on a nine-storey apartment building in Kharkiv. Moscow said it targeted data centres and other infrastructure, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukraine would “pay a price” for its recent attacks on Russia.
🇽🇰 War crimes verdicts fuel Kosovo protests. Thousands have joined daily demonstrations across Kosovo after a Hague-based court convicted former President Hashim Thaci and three other former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders of war crimes, sentencing them to between 13 and 25 years in prison. Protesters, who regard the verdicts as unjust, are demanding that Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s government take concrete steps to support the former commanders, while the opposition has called for restrictions on the court’s reach. The protests add pressure on Kurti amid an 18-month political crisis, with his government facing an October 6 deadline to secure an agreement on electing a new president or risk yet another early election. A larger demonstration is planned in Pristina for October 1, suggesting the political temperature is unlikely to cool anytime soon.
🇷🇸 Vučić switches jobs. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has resigned months before the end of his second term to lead his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) into an early parliamentary election on October 25 and seek the premiership. Constitutionally barred from a third presidential term, Vučić faces a major challenge from a student-backed movement that emerged from protests following the 2024 Novi Sad railway station disaster and has since focused on corruption and the rule of law. Acting president Ana Brnabić, a close Vučić ally and former prime minister, will serve until the newly elected parliament chooses its speaker, who will then schedule a presidential election. The vote will test whether nearly two years of protests can loosen the SNS’s 14-year hold on power (or simply move Vučić from one office back to another).
🇵🇱 Gibała leads Kraków vote. Independent Łukasz Gibała won the first round of Kraków’s snap mayoral election with 36.4%, ahead of Civic Coalition-backed Senator Monika Piątkowska on 29.9%, sending the pair to an October 11 runoff. The election followed the May recall of Civic Coalition mayor Aleksander Miszalski and has been closely watched as a test for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s camp ahead of Poland’s 2027 parliamentary election. Gibała narrowly lost the local election in 2024 and could now attract support from opposition parties seeking to keep Civic Coalition out of city hall. With turnout at 43.5%, Kraków voters will be back at the ballot box in two weeks to settle round two.
🇱🇹 Lithuania keeps Russian billionaires blacklisted. Vilnius has imposed national sanctions on Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman after the European Union removed the two businessmen from its sanctions list earlier this month. Both are now barred from entering Lithuania for five years, with the restrictions subject to possible extension, while Latvia and Estonia are preparing similar measures. France reportedly pushed for Usmanov’s removal from the EU blacklist on national security grounds, while Luxembourg sought Fridman’s delisting after he sued the country for €15 billion over frozen assets. The Baltic states, however, are keeping their own door firmly shut.
25 YEARS OF THE COLLEGE OF EASTERN EUROPE
On 25 September, the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe (KEW), the publisher of New Eastern Europe, marked its 25th anniversary with an open meeting at our headquarters in Wojnowice. Friends and partners came together to discuss plans for the next decade.
KEW's aim remains the same: to be a compass for good neighbourly relations in Central and Eastern Europe. We pursue it through our books, journals, seminars and conferences, in the spirit of Jan Nowak-Jeziorański.
If you find yourself in Wrocław before 9 October, an exhibition on KEW's past activities is on display on Kuźnicza Street.
EXPERT OPINION
Where East meets West
This text was published in the very first issue of New Eastern Europe by the late Martin Pollack, Austrian author, translator and friend of the magazine. Its relevance is just as strong today, as demonstrated by this abridged version.
What does a Western European see in the eastern part of the continent? What would a satiated Austrian see if, changing his own habits, he decided to turn his attention to the East rather than the West? Or if, for some reason, he put aside his own minor, everyday concerns and contemplated the region, incorrectly called Eastern Europe? Let’s put it differently: What do Western Europeans expect from these countries? What can they find there?
This is a legitimate question, as there is always a gap between image and reality. We become convinced that we see things and have certain knowledge. We contrive our own opinions. And yet all these are simply conjectures, predetermined opinions, prejudices which would not pass a reality test. Rarely do we consider such a confrontation. It would not even cross our minds to make an attempt to break stereotypes, which, in many cases, have been passed down to us for generations. Hence, our attitude towards Eastern Europe has been shaped by such ungrounded judgements, fake images and clichés.
Eastern Europe – where is it?
Problems already arise with an attempt to precisely define the term “Eastern Europe”. Where is it? What are its eastern and western borders? Which countries does it include? Is it still politically correct to use this term? Isn’t it more correct to say “Central and Eastern Europe”, “South-Eastern Europe” and “North-Eastern Europe”? Not that long ago, the common belief was that Eastern Europe was the area inhabited by the Slavs. This image still haunts us and many people believe in this absurd idea. Just think: how Slavic are the Hungarians, the Albanians, the Romanians, the Moldovans, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, or the Estonians? Maybe they should be considered Western Europeans?
The problem doesn’t end there. In geographical terms, at least from Austria’s perspective, Eastern Europe is almost impossible to be captured in one definition. A glimpse at a map and we see that Prague is more to the West than Vienna and the same goes for Ljubljana, Rijeka or Szczecin. All these cities would be assigned the label Eastern Europe, without much thought, although their residents really feel that they live in Central Europe.
My point here is that the idea of Eastern Europe is more a political than geographical concept. Its borders were drawn after 1945 and fell under the influence of the Soviet Union. For decades, we, in the West (and of course in this context the term West is just as imprecise as Eastern Europe) were content referring to the countries of the Eastern bloc or just simply the Eastern bloc. We looked at this region as if it was one uniform territory deprived of differences or borders. For us, Eastern Europe was an area in which everything was more or less the same: politics, economy, lifestyles, people’s mentality and even the cities and countryside. We had a vague idea that the landscape was slightly different, but we had no first-hand knowledge of it because we had never travelled east.
And when it comes to travelling east, not much has really changed. Even today a trip to Ukraine or Moldova is regarded, just like it was years ago, as a risk. Many of us simply prefer not to go there: sicher ist sicher.
— Martin Pollack (1944-2025), Austrian writer, journalist and translator.
CHECK OUT THE LATEST ISSUE
Fifteen years ago, we promised to bring you stories from Eastern Europe and honest analysis of where it was heading. This issue delivers promise: Moldova's fight to preserve its statehood under mounting Russian pressure, Belarus's unfinished reckoning with itself, a changing Polish diaspora in the UK, and a republished essay by the late Martin Pollack — written for our very first issue in 2011, worth reading again to see how much has, or has not, changed. It is our biggest milestone issue yet.
ARTICLES OF THE WEEK
CARTOON OF THE WEEK
Do you want to see more of Andrzej’s drawings? Check out our dedicated gallery page featuring his cartoons here.