Latest Eurasia Daily Monitor Articles

Saakashvili Grapples With Daunting Odds in Ukraine’s Odesa

Three weeks ago, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appointed Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa province, with a dual mission: to jump-start reforms based on his experience in reforming Georgia, and to consolidate Ukrainian control in a territory potentially targeted by Russia.... MORE

Financial Defaults May Loom for North Caucasian Republics

Russian news agencies reported in early June that Novgorod Oblast in central Russia had become the country’s first region to default on its financial obligations. An official from the Novgorod financial department told RBK news agency that the region failed to make a payment of... MORE

Putin’s Economic Forum: Delays, Obfuscations and Irrelevance

The annual St. Petersburg economic forum used to be a major gathering of investors and stakeholders, who would anticipate President Vladimir Putin’s keynote speech every year for hints about where to find the richest dividends in the Russian economy. This year, however, the traditional pomp... MORE

Myth and Reality in Russia’s Asian Policy

According to Russian analysts and leaders like Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Russia has turned to Asia because of Western sanctions and is making steady progress there in achieving its objectives (RT, June 11). However, such talk is entirely unfounded. If anything, Russian relations with Japan... MORE

The Turkish Election and Responses in the South Caucasus

The general election in Turkey on June 7 has radically changed the country’s political landscape. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has lost its absolute majority, winning only 258 of the 276 seats it needed, and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has now... MORE

Elections and Politics in and Around Belarus

The chairwoman of the Central Electoral Commission of Belarus, Lidia Ermoshina, has proposed to conduct the upcoming presidential elections on October 11—that is, more than one month earlier than the previously set date of November 15. The official explanation of this shift has to do... MORE

What Caused the Demise of the Caucasus Emirate?

Nearly seven years ago, in the fall of 2007, Islamic militants in the North Caucasus who were unhappy with the ideology of independence for Ichkeria replaced it with an Islamic ideology and declared the formation of the Caucasus Emirate (Kavkazsky Uzel, December 29, 2014). The... MORE

Bringing Belarus Back in From the Cold (Part Four)

To read Part One, please click here.To read Part Two, please click here.To read Part Three, please click here. To help lessen Belarus’s economic dependence on Russia, and reach out to mainstream Belarusian society, the European Union has a range of non-political instruments available. The... MORE