In case you've been living under a cold rock, the world has been getting hotter, and Eastern Europe is no exception. Last year was the warmest year on record in Europe, with the central and eastern parts of the continent bearing the brunt of it.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, “southeastern Europe experienced its longest heatwave on record in July 2024”, exacerbated by “extreme events in central and eastern Europe associated with Storm Boris”. The future is looking grim as well. Central and eastern Europe are predicted to see an increase in heavy rain and flash floods of up to 35% by 2100.

How hot has it really become?

In 2018, British scientist Ed Hawkins created the now famous “climate stripes” charts. They were meant to be simple, straightforward ways to show the slow boil of our planet.

Today, for #ShowYourStripes day, I made some climate stripes for Eastern European and Central Asian countries.

Let’s start with my own country, the Republic of Moldova. The average temperature throughout last year reached a record 12.7°C, some 3.4°C higher than the 1951-1980 average.

In the chart above, the line represents the 10-year average annual temperature for Moldova (to account for year-to-year spikes). The background stripes represent each individual year.

Here’s one for Poland, which shows a similar pattern of temperatures rising rapidly in the 1980s and reaching records in the last few years.

It’s a similar story in Central Asia. Uzbekistan has seen temperatures rise from an average of 12.6°C before 1980 to 15.3°C in 2023.

These charts are a deviation from the classic climate stripes, as they add the line and some additional labels.

But if you’re looking for the classic charts, I’ve got you covered. Here’s a climate stripes visualisation of temperature rise in Czechia.

If you want a chart for your own Eastern European or Central Asian country, I’ve made them available for download. Feel free to share them

Download charts

I’ve also made the code used to generate them available here.

I’m in Poland for the next week or so. Let me know if you want to meet for a stout by replying to this email!

Instead of the usual diplomatic pleasantries, Trump and his vice-president JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy for not saying "thank you" enthusiastically enough, accused him of "gambling with World War III", and then promptly kicked him out of the White House.

Among many of Trump's claims in his meeting with the Ukrainian leader, he said that the US has spent $350bn on the war in Ukraine. This is not the first time the US president has mentioned this figure.

Earlier this week, he justified forcing Ukraine to cede $500bn worth of its minerals by saying that the latter gets "$350bn and lots of equipment, military equipment and the right to fight on." He repeated the figure on Truth Social: "Volodymyr Zelenskyy talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle". The random capitalisation is his own.

Europe, according to the orange man, has only spent $100bn.

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How much did the US give Ukraine?

According to the US government's Ukraine oversight working group, the US has allocated about $183bn to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion. Of those, $65.9bn have actually gone to Ukraine, with another $58bn spent in the US.

Another set of figures comes from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank. They put the total US spending at $123bn, nearly three times less than Trump's claim. Europe, on the other hand, has spent $142bn, more than the US.

Like so many of the other Trump claims, the $350bn figure has no basis in reality. He now wants to cut all aid to Ukraine.

Millions of people killed

In one of his earlier rants last week, Trump also spoke of "millions of people killed, including the soldiers" in Ukraine.

That, of course, is also false.

While the exact numbers aren't publically known, the Ukrainian government, Western intelligence agencies, and independent journalists have come up with estimates of casualties for troops and civilians on both sides of the conflict.

None of those estimates put the deaths in the millions. Even adding up the highest estimates of civilian and military fatalities, the total number would still be in the low hundreds of thousands.

Arguably, the deaths of Russian forces shouldn't even be counted as a reason to stop supporting Ukraine. In fact, they should be a reason to continue supporting Ukraine.

The deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are of course still tragic, but Trump's disregard for the truth is yet more proof that he doesn't really care about the people of Ukraine beyond using them as talking points.

Approval rating

It feels odd to even bother with this one because it's so stupid, but let's do it anyway.

Trump says that Zelenskyy is "down at 4% approval rating."

This is, again, false. Hope you're catching on to the pattern here.

According to two polling agencies in Ukraine, Zelenskyy's approval rating has risen sharply since the full-scale Russian invasion of his country, and remains significantly higher than before 2022. In recent polls, his approval rating is on an upward trend, sitting at 63% in February.

Meanwhile, Trump's approval rating sits 15 points lower at 47.7%. Perhaps that explains some of his deranged behaviour?

Fact-checking Trump is, in many ways, a fool's errand. It would take a team working around the clock to keep up with his lies, and it wouldn't make a difference in the end.

This latest outburst against Ukraine, however, add to the steaming pile of evidence that the US is an unreliable ally at best, and an enemy at worst. In that pile are other brilliant decisions, such as the US siding with Russia, Iran and North Korea in the UN, and banning AP and Reuters journalists from the White House, while allowing Russian state propaganda agency TASS.

If Europe is to stand a chance in this new world order, it must be prepared to do so without the US, or even against it.

Слава Україні!

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Oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili emerged as the winner in Georgia’s vote on Saturday, in what the opposition called a 'stolen' parliamentary election. There have been multiple documented instances of ballot stuffing and intimidation.

The presidential election in Moldova, just a week earlier, was thankfully a bit more peaceful.

Nevertheless, authorities in Moldova documented large-scale corruption ahead of the vote. Oligarch and notorious dipshit Ilan Shor tried to bribe 130,000 voters — nearly 10% of the final count — to cast their ballots for one of the pro-Russian candidates, and to vote against or abstain from voting in a referendum on the European Union. These are just documented cases, the police say the real number may be as high as 300,000.

Now that the Central Electoral Commission has published some data, let’s look at the results of the first round of the presidential election. Scroll further down for the referendum results.

Presidential election

Incumbent president Maia Sandu came in first with 42.5% of the vote, more than the 36.2% she got in the first round four years ago.

This may look like a good result for her, but it was lower than predicted by polls, and below the 50% threshold necessary to win, so we’re due a runoff next Sunday.

Sandu will face Alexandr Stoianoglo — a former prosecutor and relative newcomer to politics — who had the support of about 26% of voters.

Nominally pro-European, he is backed by the pro-Russian Socialists Party, which he previously said was headed by a politician who received bags of cash from Moldova’s most infamous oligarch. This isn’t a metaphor, we’re talking about actual plastic bags full of cash, caught on camera. But hey, that’s politics for you.

The outcome looks predictably boring, with Sandu some 16 points ahead of Stoianoglo. Surely that’s all sorted, then?

While the pro-European votes mostly fell in line behind Sandu this electoral season, the pro-Russian vote was more fragmented.

Aforementioned Ilan Shor, a guy who is responsible for stealing about $1bn from the Moldovan people and oxygen from the planet by continuing to exist, currently hiding in Moscow, has backed a handful of candidates.

Victoria Furtună (4.45%) and Vasile Tarlev (3.19%) are both understood to be Shor stand-ins, with Irina Vlah (5.38%) also potentially serving as a backup choice.

Populist Renato Usatîi (13.8%) has lately positioned himself as an independent, but has historically sided heavily with Russian interests.

Together, all these candidates managed to win over half of the votes.

Does that mean we know the results of the second round? Not necessarily.

While Usatîi has long lauded Russia, he has refused to endorse either of the finalists. Nevertheless, his voter base is squarely pro-Russian, so I expect most of his votes to go to Stoianoglo.

Regardless, the results still paint a pretty grim picture. They are particularly shocking in some parts of the country.

The chart below shows the vote split by the different districts of Moldova, as well as the voters abroad. The height of each bar is proportional to the number of people who voted there.

What do the numbers tell us?

The Moldovan diaspora (👋) was Sandu’s most loyal base, with the sitting president receiving 70.7% of the vote from abroad.

In Chișinău, the capital, 48.5% voted for Sandu, though that goes up to about 50% if you add up the votes of the two other pro-Western candidates.

Sandu was chosen by the majority of voters in a few other central districts, such as Ialoveni and Strășeni.

At the other end, voters in the autonomous region of Găgăuzia — primarily inhabited by a Russian-speaking Turkic ethnic group — overwhelming rejected Sandu (just 2.4%). Tensions between Găgăuzia and Chișinău have always been high, but they have been rising in recent years after Evghenia Guțul, another Shor minion, became governor of the region.

Sandu had a poor performance in other districts in the south and north of the country. Surprisingly, she did better in Transnistria (25.2%), which is under Russian control and subjected to much higher levels of propaganda and censorship, than in other parts of Moldova.

As a general rule, Sandu was more popular in cities, while Usatîi’s campaign resonated more in the countryside.

What does this mean for next Sunday’s election?

The pro-Russian candidates seem to have the edge for now. The police have raided and arrested several of Shor’s lieutenants for voter corruption, somewhat disrupting his network.

As is often the case in Moldova, participation rates will determine the outcome. Pro-Russian voters skew older and tend to have a higher participation rate. If Sandu can activate her base in the next 6 days, and if the diaspora delivers again, there may still be a chance for her.

The real challenge for Moldova, however, is the parliamentary elections next year.

EU referendum

In addition to the presidential election, Moldovans were also invited to vote on a constitutional amendment enshrining the country’s aspiration to join the EU.

Some pro-Russian presidential candidates, as well as some “neutral” ones, have called for a boycott of the referendum, hoping the participation rate would fall below the 33% threshold needed for it to be valid.

That plan backfired. If those who boycotted the referendum (some 57k people) voted against the constitutional amendment instead, it wouldn’t have passed. Instead, the “yes” campaign won on a razor-thin margin — 10.6k people or 50.35% of the votes.

Here, again, the diaspora (👋) was instrumental in making it happen.

The regional vote largely follows the same patter as the presidential election, except shifted slightly to the right (because of the boycott from the candidates on the left), so we won’t dwell on it too much.

Again, what’s surprising is that nearly a third (31%) of Transnistrian voters wanted to see Moldova in the EU, more than seven (!!!) other districts of the country. To note that participation rates in Transnistria are always pretty low.

Some districts like Ungheni and Cahul, both bordering Romania and the recipients of lots of EU funds, also voted against the constitutional amendment.

What next?

Putin has poured an unprecedented amount of resources into this election. Is this a last ditch attempt to keep Moldova in his sphere of influence, or just an escalation in the hybrid war his country has been waging against my country since our independence?

It all depends on the result of the runoff election next Sunday.

If you’re a Moldovan citizen, please vote. If you’re someone who know a Moldovan, urge them to vote. If you’re neither… ugh… tell your friends to subscribe to my newsletter, I guess?

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Overall, it shows what you’d expect: Nordic countries are at the top, Western Europe is doing okay, the US is doing a little worse, and most of East Asia and large chunks of Africa have a poor performance.

But what about Eastern Europe and Central Asia? Here’s a paragraph from the RSF:

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, media censorship has intensified in a spectacular mimicry of Russian repressive methods, especially in Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan. Kremlin influence has reached as far as Serbia, where pro-government media carry Russian propaganda and the authorities threaten exiled Russian journalists. Russia, where Vladimir Putin was unsurprisingly reelected in 2024, continues to wage a war in Ukraine that has had a big impact on the media ecosystem and journalists’ safety.

Here’s each country’s progress for the past 10 years.

What this spaghetti-looking chart shows us is that the Baltics have taken the top three spots as the countries with the most press freedom, followed by the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Notably, Poland has gone from #3 in 2014 to #11 this year, the second-biggest drop after Serbia.

Meanwhile, Macedonia has jumped from #21 to a respectable #7, the biggest increases in the last 10 years.

Like most other statistics involving Central Asia, Turkmenistan is squarely at the bottom.

Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh pleaded with the EU to be removed from sanctions lists, saying he helped “thousands of engineers” leave the country, and that they would be “an asset wherever they land.”

Where exactly did these engineers land?

Russia’s brain drain

By various estimates, Putin has sent 350,000 to 410,000 young men to die or become crippled in Ukraine. But Russian losses don’t stop there.

Many of those who dodged the draft chose to instead leave the country. Some young professionals — scientists, software engineers, project managers and the like — now fill up cafés in Yerevan and Tbilisi.

Official economic data from Russia is notoriously difficult to find, and even more difficult to believe. However, we can use alternative sources to get a picture of what’s happening.

Figures from GitHub, a popular platform for software developers to store and collaborate on code, reveal some interesting trends.

While the number of developers in all Eastern European and Central Asian countries has grown since the beginning of the war, it has done so at different rates.

Russia has seen a slowdown from the second quarter of 2022, while countries like Georgia and Armenia have experienced an unexpected surge.

Some of this may be natural evolution in developing countries such as Uzbekistan. Tools are becoming more accessible and AI makes coding easier.

But if we look at “git pushes” — a technical term that indicates how many times users upload code to GitHub — a wartime trend emerges.

The level of activity in Georgia quadrupled in just two years since the end of 2021, while Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian activity remained relatively flat. In Armenia, the number of pushes more than doubled.

What does that tell us?

Perhaps the Caucasus is going through a technological revolution. But what’s more likely is that Russia’s brightest are now shining from neighbouring countries.

Georgia and Armenia are relatively small countries, with relatively low numbers of developers. But what about the big players?

America is not playing any more

Since GitHub is a platform that enables collaboration between developers, let’s look at cross-border collaboration for some interesting trends.

The chart below shows the number of contributions (pushes and pulls) from developers outside Russia to Russian projects. For clarity and simplicity, I’ve combined some of the countries into bigger groups.

We can see that code contributions from Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan to Russian projects have increased significantly since the invasion.

The same is true for the collective “Others”, which includes every country not explicitly charted. Thailand, for example, saw a significant bump around when the war started.

This may indicate that many Russian developers have moved to these countries, but they continue to work for their Russian employers or collaborate with colleagues who have stayed behind.

Meanwhile, contributions from the EU to Russia have taken a hit, although they regained the top spot towards the end of 2023. Many Russians have relocated to Europe as well.

What about the other side of the coin? Who do the developers still in Russia work with?

Before the war, the US was typically the largest destination for Russian-written code, accounting for nearly half of all foreign pushes and pulls. Many American companies employed Russian coders for their expertise and low cost of labour.

Since the war, however, the number of Russian contributions to American projects has declined significantly, accounting for just a quarter by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, contributions to “other” markets have increased.

Perhaps the Russians who left the country were the ones most likely to work on US projects. Or perhaps Russians are now less likely to contribute to American projects, and Americans are less likely to welcome the contributions.

The global picture

Let’s turn our attention away from Russia for a minute.

Bangladesh has seen a sustained growth in recent years. In the last year alone, the number of developers surged from 616,000 to almost 1.1 million. There were just 216,000 Bangladeshi developers on GitHub at the beginning of 2020.

While Bangladesh’s tech scene is booming, it’s important to note that those 1.1m developers are still just a small fraction of its population of about 174m.

On a GitHub accounts per capita basis, Hong Kong, Singapore and Iceland lead the chart.

Among Eastern European countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania lead with around 5-7 GitHub accounts for every 100 people in the country.

They’re followed by Slovenia, Bulgaria, Czechia and, in large part due to the Russian exodus, Armenia.

At the other end, Central Asian countries such as Turkmenistan and Tajikistan only have one GitHub account for every 200 people.

It’s worth noting that one account doesn’t necessarily mean one software developer. GitHub is not the only platform to share code, and it’s more popular in some countries than in others.

Additionally, developers are free to register as many accounts as they want, while some accounts may be inactive.

However, the figures do seem to match my anecdotal sense, and they’re the best we have available.

I've been busy with my new job, so I’ve abandoned the newsletter for a bit. I’m hoping to start writing more often, perhaps combining shorter, one-chart stories with more in-depth analysis like this. Reply to this email if there’s anything that interests you.

In the meantime, check out this Economist story on the ever-changing borders of Russia and Ukraine.

And if you liked this article, you can always share it with someone else!

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The average human spends just over nine hours in bed, and another two and a half hours passively watching TV or listening to the radio.

Add work, cooking and the myriad of other things you’re expected to do to the mix, and that leaves you with only about an hour and four minutes for education and research, which is what I’m going to pretend I’m doing here.

But being Eastern European, I have even less time for luxuries such as research: just 48 minutes.

These figures come from a 2023 paper with the catchy title of “The global human day”, which attempted to provide an overview of the average day of the eight billion people living on the planet.

The data is available on a country-by-country basis so, naturally, we can aggregate them to wider regions as well.

A few things are immediately obvious.

For one, it seems like Eastern Europeans spend about nine minutes more in bed than our neighbours in the west. If the figure seems high to you, it’s because it includes children.

We also spend an extra six minutes cooking, so we’re either less efficient, or our food is better. Living in the UK, I’ll let you guess which way I’m leaning.

But we also spend 28 fewer minutes on passive activities (meaning watching TV, listening to the radio, that sort of thing) and 10 fewer minutes driving or using public transportation.

It’s us against the world

Let’s take this comparison up a notch.

The chart below shows the differences in time spent on different activities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia compared with the rest of the world, although I’ve removed activities that take less than half an hour for simplicity.

Eastern Europeans and Central Asians spend a third more time on “artifacts” which, in this study, means the manufacture of everything that’s not nailed down to the ground (textiles, medicine, cars, electronics, etc).

We also spend more time on “inhabited environment”, or cleaning, doing laundry, watering plants, and other household chores and on “interactive”, or having hobbies.

What we do less of is socialising with others — a fifth less than the rest of the world. We also spend less time on education or driving around.

How does your country compare?

Interested in what the figures are for your country? Click or tap on the image below to explore the data.

Postscriptum

Let’s start with some personal news. I have left my job at BBC News and am about to start a new one investigating the fossil fuels industry at Global Witness (with data, of course).

If you’d like to get in touch about any tips, interesting data or anything else you’d like to talk about, reply to this email or find other ways to get in touch on my website.

Who is Estonia not letting in?

In a previous newsletter, I looked at where Russians live outside Russia. Narva in Estonia, on the border with Russia, stood out due to its high share of ethnic Russians.

Over the last year, Narva had to deal with an influx of border crossings and ERR has published an analysis of who wasn’t allowed in. Spoiler: Russians aren’t the biggest group.

Climate change and wine

Nevertheless, Estonians may have other reasons to celebrate. The Economist has done a great interactive story on how climate change is changing the wine landscape of Europe. If you don’t have a subscription (ahem), the gist of it is this: start getting ready to drink a lovely Chardonnay from the Baltic coast.

Czechoslovak geography manuals

Finally, I stumbled upon this lovely geography textbook from 1930s Czechoslovakia courtesy of David Rumsey. Some really good-looking charts in there!

In that particular Christmas episode, protagonists Del Boy and Rodney come up with a plan to bottle and sell tap water under the “Peckham Spring” brand, named after a London district not far from where I live.

The episode came to public attention again in 2004, when journalists discovered that Coca-Cola’s newly-launched Dasani brand was just tap water bottled about 15km from Peckham. Tom Scott does a good job explaining that story in this video.

As Tom mentions, the episode was viewed by 20 million people, more than a third of the British population. It was by far the most viewed programme on that day, and one of the most viewed that year (as Christmas Day programmes tend to be).

This was not the first time — or the last — Only Fools and Horses took the top spot on Christmas.

In fact, it happened eight times between 1990 and 2003, according to figures from Barb, Britain’s television ratings company.

Fools was not only popular, it was well-liked. And I mean really well-liked.

On IMDb, it is the 35th best-rated TV series of all time with an overall rating of 9/10, above classics such as Seinfeld, Succession, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

It didn’t start that way. The first season started off slow, and the characters were not fully-fleshed out. But the quality picks up in season 2 and peaks in season 6.

Nevertheless, the 1996 Christmas trilogy takes the top spot as the best “season”, with the third episode, Time on Our Hands, also being the best-rated episodes of the entire sitcom.

Overall, it’s an excellent series and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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The Balkan connection

So, what about the title of this newsletter? What’s the Balkans got to do with it?

If you go back to the IMDb ratings page, you’ll see a filter that allows you to see the average rating Only Fools and Horses received by country.

Besides the UK, Ireland and the US, IMDb offers two more countries: Serbia and Croatia. And they love it even more that the Brits.

But let’s not limit ourselves to IMDb ratings.

A quick look at Google Trends shows us a similar picture. In the chart below, 100 means Fools has the most popularity as a fraction of total searches in the UK.

So while the UK takes the top spot, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia are not far behind.

In Serbia and other Serbo-Croatian-speaking countries, the show is better known as Mućke, while in Macedonian it is Spletki. What stays the same is the popularity of the show.

So popular, in fact, that John Challis, the actor who plays the character Boycie, received an honorary Serbian citizenship.

In 2020, Challis even made a documentary called Boycie in Belgrade. You can watch the trailer’s below.

If you’re in Belgrade, might as well pop into Kafe Mucke, the only Fools-themed restaurant in the world, allegedly. Why they didn’t call it “The Nag’s Head” is beyond me.

So why did a British show win so many hearts in the Balkans? Here’s a quote from the BBC.

"Our mentality is similar," said 41-year-old Jelena Kraljevic, "the ways we manage to make ends meet and our wish to become millionaires."

And a similar opinion from The Guardian.

"The life of Del Boy and ­Rodney is very similar to life here. They always have some crazy ideas to make money. They always get themselves in some ridiculous situations," says Svetlana Zecevic, an ­officer in the Serbian Ministry of Finance, and a huge fan of the show.

And again from The Sun (which I’m not going to link to because it’s The Sun).

Djordje says: “Boycie is a great example to us in Serbia. When we grew up watching Only Fools And Horses he was always doing some business, and that’s what we’ve been doing in Serbia for the past 30 years. All of us are thinking, ‘This time next year we’ll be millionaires’ — that’s the important thing for us.

Time for a rewatch. Just avoid the American remake pilot.

Postscriptum

The Pope went to Hungary. If you’re into that sort of thing, ATLO have a visual story of that and other visits. Why there are AI images in that article, I couldn’t tell you.

There were also elections in Poland earlier this month. As often happens, the results of the vote revealed some of Poland’s “phantom borders”. Check out this article from The Economist for more details.

Do you have any data analysis or visualisation needs? I might be able to help. Get in touch by replying to this email.

Also, don’t be a plonker; share this with a friend!

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While on this holiday, I discovered the excellent Sofia Electric Brewing Co, one of the best breweries I had the pleasure of giving my money to. I didn’t think of Bulgaria as the place I’ll discover good beer, which begs the question: is Eastern European beer any good?

Wikipedia has a map that says the traditional drink of choice in Eastern Europe is wine in the south and vodka in the north. Only Czechia and, to some extent, Slovakia, are seen as traditional beer strongholds.

Considering that, it won’t surprise you to find that Czechia is Eastern Europe’s biggest beer exporter. According to the UN’s Comtrade database, the country exported 567.5 million litres of beer in 2022 alone.

But if my newsletter-writing habits are of any indication, it’s not about the quantity. While a cold Staropramen was just what I needed on a morning pit stop in Bucharest, it was not the best beer on my holiday.

For the past few months, I’ve been tracking my beers on Untappd, a social network for beer amateurs that allows you to rate beers on a scale from zero to five. The platform had nearly one million active users in 2020. Can we learn anything from them?

Only 10 of the 1,000 most popular beers on Untappd are from Eastern Europe. Half of those are Czech (Pilsner Urquell, Budweiser Budvar, Staropramen Premium, Kozel Černý and Krušovice Imperial), two are Polish (Żywiec and Tyskie Gronie), two are Croatian (Karlovačko and Ožujsko) and one is Turkish (Efes Pilsen).

We’ve re-established that Czech beers are popular among the masses. What about wannabe beer aficionados like myself?

I’ve scraped 23,517 of the best-rated beers on Untappd to see if there’s anything to learn. Note that these are only beers with 150 or more ratings, so this analysis might not include that craft microbrewery in your neighbourhood.

What’s the best beer in Eastern Europe, then? As Good As It Gets (Cellar Series) from Estonia takes the top spot with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5.

The next three best beers come our way from Estonia as well, all from the Pühaste Brewery (Midnight Macchiato Bourbon BA, Sanctum: Cocos Rum BA and Trinity In Black Bourbon BA).

One thing immediately stands out. All the beers listed above, as well as many of the other best-rated beers, are Imperial Stouts. Let’s crunch the numbers.

As you can see in the chart above, stouts (and porters) make up 36.9% of the beers produced in Eastern Europe or Central Asia rated between four and five stars. That drops to 13.6% of beers rated between three and four, and a negligible 1.2% of beers rated between two and three.

Sours also make up a significant share of the best rated beers (24.8%), while IPAs and Pale Ales seem to be a good middle ground, taking up a good chunk (29.7%) of the three to four star beers.

On the other end, lagers are virtually absent at the top, but very well represented among the less-liked beers between two and three stars (42.3%).

The takeaway is that people think Eastern European stouts and sours are great, IPAs are good to mediocre, and lagers are quite bad.

This begs the question, who’s brewing all these excellent stouts?

As we saw earlier, Estonia is a big one, but stouts were also the dominant style among the top 50 best-rated beers in Poland, Czechia, Romania and Bulgaria.

Sours were particularly well-rated in Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Croatia and Russia, while IPAs were the most common choice among top drinks in much of the Balkans, Lithuania, Belarus, Slovakia and Hungary.

This, of course, is just a snapshot in time and things are likely to shift around. It should also be noted that some drinkers, particularly those in Central Asian countries like Turkmenistan, don’t have much choice in terms of beer in general, while beer amateurs in Czechia are spoiled with thousands of brews.

To wrap things up, I can also tell you that Romanians like their craft beer strong at an incredible average of 7.4% ABV, while Slovaks and Poles like their beers bitter, with both countries averaging 39+ on the International Bitterness Units scale.

This, again, doesn’t necessarily represent overall drinking habits, just the average of the most popular beers in each country according to Untappd.

Because you made it so far down the article, here’s a bonus: an interactive table with all the beers in this analysis. Click on the image or the link above to search for a beer, brewery, style or country.

Postscriptum

If you’d like to keep up with my alcoholism beer tasting habits, you can send me a friend request on Untappd. I don’t always remember to rate the beers I’m drinking (especially towards the end of a session), but I’ve been trying to expand my palette.

🍺 Find me on Untappd

If the intersection of data journalism and beer is your jam, then I also recommend checking out this totally serious Financial Times investigation into the price of a pint in Britain (non-paywall link).

Since my alcoholism taste is not limited to beer, I’m planning to look into the wine scene in a future edition of the newsletter. If you’d like to read it when it comes out, the best way is to subscribe. And if you found this article interesting, why not send it to a drinking buddy?

For those of us who can’t afford to pay the equivalent of a brand new Dacia Duster for a spreadsheet, what can we learn from the bits that are available to the public?

Let’s start with the good news. The world has, on average, better living conditions than at any point in the past 15 years. Some of it is down to a post-pandemic recovery, and some of it is down to improvements in healthcare and education.

How do Eastern Europe and Central Asia compare to other regions?

We’re not quite as good as the developed Western Europe, North America and Australasia regions, but not as bad as Latin America, the MENA region or Africa.

In the chart below, each dot is a city, and the further right they are, the better.

While most cities in Western Europe (save for Athens) and North America are crowded at the top of the rankings, there’s a fairly wide range in quality of life in Eastern Europe.

Budapest came out as the most “liveable” city in Eastern Europe, scoring a nice 91.1 out of 100. This puts it at 39th out of 173, with the same score as Chicago, Miami and Madrid. Prague, Bratislava and Warsaw also scored above average.

The further east you go, the worse it gets. Almaty, Baku and Tashkent are all in the bottom 30% of worst places to live, according to the Economist.

Kyiv has been on a downwards trajectory since Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014. This year, Kyiv scored 44 out of 100, compared with 49.1 in 2021 and 67.9 in 2013. The Ukrainian capital was excluded from the ranking last year. It is now in the top 10 least liveable cities, with particularly bad scores for stability and infrastructure.

Moscow, meanwhile, has done little growth of its own since 2013, falling from 76.3 to 73.9. I suspect being under threat of occupation from mercenary squads might knock it down a few more notches next year. Russian cities score lower than before the war, largely due to Western sanctions as well as the actions of the Russian government itself.

Another city worth mentioning is Bucharest. While it was still quite low down the list at #99, it had the fourth-best growth compared to last year. This is most likely because of its post-pandemic recovery, rather than some radical improvement in liveability.

Overall, Eastern European and Central Asian cities have seen an improvement in their stability scores as the risk of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine spilling into other regions diminished because, as it turns out, the Russian army is incompetent.

Once Ukraine wins the war and rebuilds, stability and infrastructure should further improve in the region, pushing the overall score up. Until then, Budapest seems to be the place to live.

A few words on methodology: each city is given a score on 30 factors across five categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. These scores are then combined for an overall number from 1 to 100.

As to why this even exists, the Economist wants companies to use this as a guide to how much to pay employees to move to these cities. Moving to Kyiv should come with an extra 20% allowance, for example, while Istanbul and Tashkent should come with an extra 15%, etc.

Postscriptum

Last month, I showed you that Russia’s claims of a “Russian World” outside its borders is often overstated, and that the number of people identifying as “Russian” is falling across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Go read it if you haven’t.

We have further confirmation of that from some recent Gallup survey data, which shows that increasingly fewer people in the countries with the largest Russian diasporas identify as Russian, with the trend accelerating in 2022.

The survey also shows that approval of Russia’s leadership has been declining in every single post-Soviet country, including among ethnic Russians. More than half of Kazakhstan, Moldova and Armenia now disapprove of Putin’s regime.

And speaking of post-Soviet countries, the Associated Press Stylebook, the go-to English style guide for journalism, is now recommending writers avoid the “former Soviet republic” cliché when introducing one of the 14 independent republics, unless it’s relevant to the story. Here’s to seeing less and less of that dreadful phrase in the future.

Another good piece of data journalism comes from Mediazona and Meduza, who used fancy machine learning to estimate that at least 47,000 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine (here’s the Meduza version).

To those of us living close to the biggest country on Earth, this sounded like a broken record. Russia has often used ethnic Russians abroad — their presence a result of Russia’s brand of colonial expansion — to harass and threaten its neighbours.

Last year, my colleague Michael Goodier and I wrote an article for the New Statesman looking at which countries could be next on Russia’s hit list based on the number of Russian speakers there.

Today, as Russia destroys civilian infrastructure and floods Ukraine, the UN marks the Russian Language Day “in order to celebrate cultural diversity and multilingualism”.

So, who will be celebrating? For the most part, those who live in Russia.

While there are significant Russian populations across the ex-Soviet states, particularly in Crimea and North-Eastern Kazakhstan, the map below clearly shows that Russians are largely contained within the national borders of the Russian Federation.

Scroll on for close-ups of specific regions for more detail.

To my knowledge, this is the most complete map of Russians in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It comes with some caveats, but more on those at the bottom of the page.

Ukraine and Moldova

Let’s start with a big ol’ disclaimer. The data for Ukraine is old. Its most recent census was in 2001, far older than any other country in this article.

There’s some anecdotal evidence that things have shifted significantly since then, and the share of Ukrainian residents who think of themselves as Russians is much smaller, but we’ll only know when Ukraine finally sets a date for the next census.

In Moldova, the census doesn’t cover the separatist region of Transnistria, so I used their own unofficial figures instead.

The Caucasus

As is the case with Transnistria above, it’s a bit of a struggle to get reliable data from Russia-backed separatist regions.

That is the case in Georgia as well, where the latest figures for Abkhazia come from an unrecognised referendum in 2014, which puts Russians at 9.1% of the population.

Elsewhere in Azerbaijan, Baku’s population was 5.3% Russian, with every other region under 3%. Please note that the scale on this map is much smaller than the ones above or below.

Central Asia

Kazakhstan’s border towns still have a significant Russian presence. The city of Ridder in East Kazakhstan is 73.8% Russian, while over 60% of the people of Shemonaikha, Altay and Glubokoe considered themselves Russian.

Outside Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan’s Bishkek has a significant Russian minority of 15.1%.

The Baltics

Around 87% of the people living in Narva and in Sillamäe in the eastern tip of Estonia are Russians. More than a third are Russian citizens.

The invasion of Ukraine has prompted a reckoning in Narva, with Russians living there split on the issue. The number of those applying for Estonian citizenship has doubled since then.

In the rest of the region, Russians largely live in the big cities, particularly the capitals.

The Union State

While Russia is launching invasion campaigns to protect Russians abroad, its own country is less Russian than you might think.

Of the 83 federal subjects of Russia — its Republics and oblasts — 14 have a share of Russians smaller than 50%.

In fact, the North Caucasus area is remarkably non-Russian. Ingushetia is less Russian than the US, for example, while Chechnya is less Russian than Germany.

While seven out of 10 Belorussians speak Russian at home, only 7.5% of the population consider themselves Russian.

Notes

Finding and aggregating data from different statistics offices, with websites in different languages and with varying degrees of quality, was hard.

I wrote more than 1,000 lines of code and many, many hours of manual data cleaning in order to put this together.

There were some calls I had to make. While most of the maps have the most granular data I could find, there are some exceptions. In Russia, for example, the 2010 census had ethnicity data down to the village level, but I couldn’t find the same data from the 2021 census.

Even if the more granular data were available, I’d probably not have used it. Each village has to be matched to where it belongs on a map, and that would be much more work than I’m willing to put in.

It should also be made clear that the data covers a very wide timeframe, 2001 to 2023. Things can change drastically in 20 years, particularly in a region as volatile as this. I have some doubts about the reliability of some of these stats too, particularly in Russia-backed separatist regions.

While I was working on this, I found a lot of interesting quirks, like the existence of the sizable Kazakhstan German minority.

I’d be interested in developing an interactive tool to explore all this data. You could select an ethnicity and browse through Eastern Europe and Central Asia at your own pace, uncovering migration oddities. If that sounds good to you, let me know by replying to this email.

Postscriptum

Why did the Russians turn out to be so cruel? NV Magazine’s Yaroslav Hrytsak actually attempted to answer that rhetorical question, and I highly recommend reading his article.

If this newsletter hasn’t fully satiated your Eastern European data journalism hunger, have no fear. In hist latest newsletter, explains why some ex-Soviet countries have managed to become functioning democracies, and some have not.

DaNumbers

All you need to know about democracy and ex-USSR countries

Dear readers, After several months of silence, this newsletter comes back. After a stressful period where I got surgery, a certain project put me under Olympic-level pressure, and I had to relocate to a new home in Brussels, I can assure you that the worst is gone and that it is now time to go back to data journalism and commit back to a project…

Read more

3 years ago · 2 likes · 6 comments · Francesco Piccinelli

Until next time!

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Since this is a newsletter about Eastern Europe, it follows that a good starting point is defining what that is. Can data show us the way?

Back in 2013, I spent a summer in the United States, much of it lifeguarding, selling burgers and drinking what Americans call beer.

During the four months I was there, I had to introduce myself to a couple dozen people every week and, as is the custom, I’d lead with explaining where I’m from.

What started as an attempt to place Moldova on the mental map of my interlocutors turned into a defeatist reduction to “I’m from Eastern Europe”. Even though I never really associated with that identity, I ended up carrying it with me to the other two places I lived in the West, Denmark and the UK.

But what is Eastern Europe? For most people, it boils down to a Cold War stereotype of “Soviet” or “communist” countries. More than 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, many countries in the east are still introduced as “post-Soviet” or “ex-communist” in English-language newspapers. Is there more to it?

Geography or cultural space?

When I went to the Czech Republic, some of the locals made a point of explaining that their country would be more accurately described as being in Central Europe, rather than Eastern Europe.

In many ways, that makes sense. Prague is further west than Vienna. Similarly, Bosnia’s east border is west of Finland. Hell, Portugal may be an honorary member of Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, people in Georgia, Armenia or Kazakhstan will claim to be in Eastern Europe, even though they’re at or even beyond the limits of what most think of as Europe.

In the Balkan Spirit documentary, Slavoj Žižek jokes about how Austrians will claim the Balkans start in Slovenia, Slovenians will tell you that they start in Croatia, Croatians will point to Serbia, and so on and so on. Eastern Europe follows a similar approach.

Or, as author Francis Tapon puts it:

If you want to make Eastern Europeans twitch and squirm, just tell them that they are from Eastern Europe. The only people who don’t seem to care are the Moldovans. They’re just happy that anyone knows that Moldova exists.

At the risk of offending everyone but my fellow Moldovans, who is this newsletter for?

What does the data say?

Regardless of the political boundary fuzziness, we need to settle on a list.

When in doubt, check the United Nations. The UN recognises 23 countries in its “Eastern European States” Regional Group. Problem solved, right?

Not if you consider the UN’s geoscheme which, as Wikipedia helpfully points out, is “not to be confused with [the] United Nations Regional Groups”. The geoscheme only includes 10 countries in the Eastern Europe subgroup.

Other UN agencies like UNICEF and UNESCO draw their own distinct borders around Eastern Europe, as do organisations including the IMF, OECD and the CIA.

I’ve looked at 12 different classifications to see the extent to which they overlap.

Four countries have made an appearance in each one of those lists: Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. On the other end, Kosovo (not a UN member, so likely underrepresented) and Turkey made it onto just two of them.

Note that a few of the classifications I’ve used include “Eastern Europe and Central Asia” than purely Eastern Europe. But that’s good enough for me.

So what is Eastern Europe according to the international community?

There is no correct answer to that question, and there are many wrong ones. I don’t expect everyone to agree with this list. You might not either, or you might not care.

I’d rather take a broad approach and include as many countries as is reasonable. If you’re interested in any of the 30 countries listed above, do hang around, and bring some friends along.

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If there are any topics you’d like me to look into, reply to this email and let me know. I’ll try to make it happen.

Postscriptum

In unrelated news, I have been watching the excellent TraumaZone documentary series from the BBC. It’s seven hours of footage from all across the Soviet Union, and it does a decent job of showing how we ended up where we are.

Data journalism has existed since at least the 1800s. But in Eastern Europe, journalism is still slow to innovate, with only a handful of outlets doing any data reporting.

This newsletter is an attempt to explore what data journalism could be in that part of the world.

Who am I?

My name is Nicu Calcea, and I’m a data journalist based in London, UK. I’m currently at BBC News, and before that, I did data at the New Statesman and a couple other places. I also teach data journalism at City, University of London.

For the purposes of this newsletter, I’m just a guy with a computer and too much free time.

Why subscribe?

If you want to be the first to find out when I publish something new, you should subscribe. It’s free!

For now, I don’t have a publishing schedule, but expect an email about once a month.

You can also follow me on Mastodon, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

What’s up with the name?

Samizdat was a form of self-publishing in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, largely of banned or censored texts. Data is, well, data.