Moldova’s LGBT community is launching a weeklong festival celebrating sexual minorities in the conservative country. Organizers are optimistic the country has come a long way since a gay march in 2008 was scuttled by rock-throwing counterdemonstrators.

Stefan Fuele, the European Union commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy, has called on the EU-hopeful countries of the Eastern Partnership and the Western Balkans to do more to prove their commitment to democratic values. Correspondent Daisy Sindelar spoke to Fuele during his visit to RFE/RL headquarters in Prague on May 9.

A newspaper has revealed that Moldovan President Nicolae Timofti, serving as a Soviet judge in 1987, ordered the confinement of a prominent dissident in a psychiatric hospital. As RFE/RL reports, the news has shone a spotlight on the "divided" life lived by Timofti's generation.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private foundation based in Washington, D.C., that provides grants and other support to organizations around the world that promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. The NED's senior director for Europe, Rodger Potocki, spoke with RFE/RL about the ongoing crackdown against nongovernmental organizations in Russia and other challenges to democracy-promotion efforts in the former Soviet Union.

In the United States, one of the most successful campaigns in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights is "It Gets Better," an online video project aimed at offering messages of hope to young people struggling with life as a sexual minority. Now the campaign is going worldwide with more than a dozen affiliates, including the first in Eastern Europe, in Moldova.

The past year has seen a sharp crackdown on sexual minorities across the former Soviet space. But tiny Moldova has emerged as an exception – with new laws, marches, and video campaigns all supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.

It’s been less than three years since the It Gets Better video campaign was launched in the United States to offer support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide. RFE/RL correspondent Daisy Sindelar spoke to Seth Levy, the president of the It Gets Better project.

British writer and historian Timothy Garton Ash was in Brussels on March 16 to take part in the German Marshall Fund's annual forum. He spoke to RFE/RL about the future of Europe.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, instability, conflict, and even war broke out across the vast territory of Eurasia. Much of the violence -- which still largely defines the former Soviet space today -- is a direct legacy of the nationalities policies of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.