What makes Eastern Europe a region

One winter

The agreement signed at Viskuli, a forest lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Polish border, opened by stating that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had ceased to exist as a subject of international law. Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed it on 8 December 1991. The Alma-Ata Protocol of 21 December brought Moldova and seven other republics into the Commonwealth of Independent States that the Viskuli text had created, and on 26 December the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet voted the union out of existence.

Each member had already moved by then. Belarus declared state sovereignty on 27 July 1990, declared independence on 25 August 1991, and took the name Republic of Belarus on 19 September. Moldova declared independence on 27 August 1991. The Verkhovna Rada passed Ukraine's act on 24 August 1991 and put it to a referendum on 1 December, where it carried 90.32% of the votes cast on a turnout of 84.18%. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was renamed the Russian Federation on 25 December.

The seats moved on a different logic. The Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR had signed the United Nations Charter at San Francisco in 1945 and are listed among the original members in their own right, so each kept a seat it already held and changed the name on it. Russia notified the Secretary-General on 24 December 1991 that it was continuing the membership of the Soviet Union, including the permanent seat on the Security Council. Moldova was admitted on 2 March 1992.

The plain, and what grows on it

Relief arrives late here. Belarus reaches its highest ground at Dziaržynkaja hara, 345 metres, and Moldova at Bălănești Hill, 430 metres. What rises stands at the rim: Hoverla, in the Ukrainian Carpathians, at 2,061 metres, and Elbrus, in the Russian Caucasus, at 5,642 metres. Belarus and Moldova have no coast.

The Dnieper rises in the Valdai Hills, crosses Belarus, and reaches the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, which puts it on the map of three of the members. The Dniester rises in the Ukrainian Carpathians, carries much of the boundary between Moldova and Ukraine, and reaches the same sea. Both rivers cross a border that was an internal administrative line until 1991 and an international one after it.

South of the forest belt the soil changes. The black earth runs east from Moldova across the Ukrainian steppe into the Russian regions north of the Caucasus: a deep humus horizon over loess, holding its structure in a loose crumb. Vasily Dokuchaev described it as a soil type in its own right in Russian Chernozem, published in 1883, and the word he used for it passed into the international soil classifications and stayed there.

Two alphabets

Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic languages written in Cyrillic. Romanian, the language recorded as official in Moldova, is Romance and written in the Latin alphabet, and it has been written that way there only since the language law of 31 August 1989, which replaced the Cyrillic orthography introduced under Soviet rule. The date is a public holiday in Moldova, Limba noastră, and the anthem adopted in 1994 carries the same title.

What the language is called has a record of its own. The constitution of 1994 names the state language Moldovan; the declaration of independence of 27 August 1991 names it Romanian. On complaints 8b/2013 and 41b/2013 the Constitutional Court held, on 5 December 2013, that the text of the declaration prevails where the two disagree, and a law of 16 March 2023 replaced the one word with the other through the statute book. The catalogue's record for Moldova lists Romanian.

What the root zone kept

The domain name system holds a longer memory than the treaty record. The code .su was registered for the Soviet Union on 19 September 1990, fifteen months before the state it stood for dissolved, and it is still delegated and still resolving: nothing in the system obliges a country code to be retired when the country is. The codes in use now were registered afterwards, .ua on 1 December 1992, .md on 24 March 1994, .ru on 7 April 1994 and .by on 10 May 1994.

The Cyrillic strings came two decades after that. Russia's second code was registered on 12 May 2010, Ukraine's on 1 March 2011 and Belarus's on 29 September 2014. Each is an internationalised label held in the root as an ASCII string beginning xn--, so the alphabet a reader sees in the address bar is not the alphabet the resolver works in.

Where the edges are argued

Three readings of this region are in print, and the catalogue applies one of them.

The M49 standard published by the UN Statistics Division puts ten countries in Eastern Europe: the members filed here together with Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. This catalogue files those six under Central Europe and the Balkans. M49 states of its own groupings that they are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning. Cold War usage ran wider again and on a different axis, taking Eastern Europe to mean the Warsaw Pact side of the line, from the treaty signed in Warsaw on 14 May 1955 to its dissolution in Prague on 1 July 1991. Governments on that side have pressed the term Central Europe since, and the Visegrád Group was formed at Visegrád on 15 February 1991.

A second reading takes the region as the Soviet successor states that lie in Europe, which would add Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This catalogue files those three under the Baltic and M49 files them under Northern Europe. Their governments describe the years from 1940 as occupation, and the acts of 1990 and 1991 as a restoration of the republics of the interwar period rather than a departure from a state they had joined.

A third argument is whether Russia belongs in Europe at all. Both this catalogue and M49 file it here, on the convention that the continental boundary follows the Urals and the Caucasus. The coordinates in Russia's own record, 66.42 degrees north and 94.25 degrees east, fall east of the Yenisei, roughly 1,500 kilometres beyond that line.

Whatever the edges, the members are not held inside one set of institutions. Moldova joined the Council of Europe on 13 July 1995 and Ukraine on 9 November 1995; Russia joined on 28 February 1996 and ceased to be a member on 16 March 2022; Belarus has never joined, and the special guest status its parliament held with the Parliamentary Assembly was suspended in January 1997. The General Assembly adopted resolution ES-11/1 on 2 March 2022 by 141 votes to five with 35 abstentions, Moldova and Ukraine voting in favour and Belarus and Russia against. The European Council granted Moldova and Ukraine candidate status for European Union membership on 23 June 2022, and accession negotiations opened on 25 June 2024. Ukraine signed the agreement that created the Commonwealth of Independent States, never ratified its charter, and ended its participation in the statutory bodies in 2018; the records for Belarus, Moldova and Russia carry that membership and Ukraine's does not.