Uncovering Europe’s Best Stories of the Year

Discovering europe it’s your daily dose of original storytelling from across the continent.

Every weekday at 7pm CET we bring you a European story that goes beyond the headlines to find the real issues that shape the continent.

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Here is the best of last year’s series.

While life for Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya would have been more difficult at home, her situation in exile in Poland is far from perfect.

The 24-year-old, who fled the Tokyo games after Belarusian officials tried to force her to take a flight home, tells Euronews that she now has bodyguards with her around the clock.

Tsimanouskaya, who lives with her husband in Poland after they both received humanitarian visas, says they monitor her every move, around the clock.

“I can’t meet my friends, because the guards don’t know them,” Tsimanouskaya told Euronews. “We can do interviews if they are planned in advance, and I can go training or swimming.”

“They say it can be organized, but I can’t go to the shops or the park. Every time I want to go out, I have to ask for permission.”

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Croatia is very proud and possessive of its brilliant coastline.

Known as “the land of 1,000 islands”, it seems unwilling to give up two of them (actually it has about 1,244 islands) to neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina.

To this day, both countries claim ownership of Mali Školj and Veliki Školj, and the tip of the nearby Klek peninsula.

Read the full article.

Be it Jean-Marie or his daughter Marine, the Le Pens have been dominant figures on the extremes of the French right for decades.

But now, five months before the next French presidential election, a new personality has burst onto the scene: Eric Zemmour.

After months of guesswork, the political rookie confirmed in November that he is entering the race.

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For more than a decade, Romanians have become accustomed to seeing, emblazoned on buildings or on the walls along busy roads, three words ending in red, yellow and blue: “Basarabia e România”.

Bessarabia no longer exists, but when it did it was the land that Russia and later the Soviet Union occupied between the Prut River and both banks of the Dniester River, as far east as the border with Ukraine and as west as Romania.

It is the land that is now known by another name, Moldova.

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A year has passed since Poland’s Constitutional Court further toughened what was already one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

On October 22, 2020, the court ruled that it was unconstitutional for women to terminate their pregnancies even in cases of serious and irreversible fetal defects, leading to a near-total ban on abortion in the largely Catholic country.

“What happened last year was basically an example of what happens if a political power destroys the rule of law and destroys judicial independence,” said Marta Lempart, co-founder of the Polish women’s strike movement, insisting that the ban on the abortion comes from an “illegitimate” and “politicized” court.

Read the full article.

On February 28, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot and killed in the street in front of a cinema in Stockholm after watching a movie with his wife and son.

His killer was never found.

Palme, who led Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and from 1982 until his death, was a divisive figure with no shortage of enemies. An outspoken critic of the US war in Vietnam and a supporter of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, he favored the expansion and extension of Sweden’s welfare state.

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Hidden behind two apartment blocks in an alley in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili’s church doesn’t look like much from the outside.

But for several years, his church has been driving change in conservative Georgia, often going against the grain, pushing barriers where and when it can.

So when Georgia’s LGBT community faced violent protesters in the streets this summer, for example, the Songulashvili congregation marched in solidarity and condemned the attacks.

Read the full article.

Tension is growing in eastern Ukraine, where the military has been locked in a conflict with Russian-backed separatists for seven years.

Russia has been deploying large amounts of military equipment near the border and there has been an increase in fighting in recent weeks.

Euronews visited Mayorsk in Donetsk, where we met with Ukrainian soldiers. Visible through the trees from here is the city of Horlivka, controlled by Russian-backed separatists. It is an area that has seen an increase in fighting.

Read the full article.

In a city covered in snow for five months out of the year, cyclists cannot be blamed for putting their bikes into hibernation for the winter.

But the people of Oulu, Finland, are made of stronger material.

Despite the long, dark and snowy winters, locals continue to pedal to and from work and school.

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With more than a quarter of a million Afghans and their descendants who call it home, Germany boasts the largest Afghan diaspora in Europe.

Afghans and Afghan-Germans have built a living, though often overlooked community in Germany.

Part of her identity is tied to a longing for home, which has only intensified as the situation in Afghanistan grows more dire.

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It’s a stark warning about the future of the pandemic – that without global access to life-saving vaccines, COVID-19 is here to stay.

The virus has traveled to every continent and infected more than 100 million people worldwide in just over a year since a global health emergency was first declared.

Humanitarian activists and experts are raising the alarm about wide gaps in vaccine distribution between the world’s richest and poorest countries.

Read the full article.