This is the fourth issue of AREI since its launch. It opens with an interview with the Estonian international lawyer Lauri Mälksoo, who analyses the Russian approach to international law from a historical perspective. It seems superfluous to explain why – in the third year of the Russian Federationʼs war against Ukraine – this topic should be of interest to readers who share the universal values that underpin contemporary international law.

We also offer our readers three erudite articles devoted to the wide-ranging problem of relations between the Soviet Union and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Texts by Mariusz Wołos, Łukasz Dryblak and Radosław Żurawski vel Grajewski are complemented by a historical essay by Jan Kieniewicz on the question of borders and peripheries in the history of Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe.

We also publish a number of documents concerning the so-called Polish NKVD operation of 1937–1938; these were found in the SBU archive in Kyiv by Yana Prymachenko and have either never been published in English or are completely unknown. This aspect of the Great Terror, which developed into genocidal repression against the Polish minority in the USSR, is still little known outside Poland.

The issue closes, as usual, with some erudite reviews, which I encourage you to read.

Łukasz Adamski

Editor-in-Chief