Following a week of protests over his offensive and defamatory statements about the May 18, 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars, Vladimir Andreev, the Russian consul general in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine, resigned from his post on May 25, 2013. These events were provoked by Andreev’s response... MORE

Ethnic Shapsugs who live in the Krasnodar region around Sochi are trying to make use of the upcoming Olympic Games to improve their position in their homeland. Aisa Achmezov, a businessman and a Circassian activist, told the Kavkazskaya Politika website that the Shapsug village of... MORE

Sixty-eight years ago this week, the Western allies forcibly returned to the Soviet Union more than 2,000 Cossacks who fought on the German side against Stalin during World War II. Some were executed and even more died in Soviet uranium mines. But Cossacks continue to... MORE

Pressed by international creditors and its own insolvency, Greece is selling off DEPA/DESFA, the state-controlled natural gas company. While Russian Gazprom looks set to acquire DEPA (Public Gas Corporation, the gas procurement and dominant distribution company), the little-known Russian company Sintez is bidding for DESFA... MORE

The Moscow European Security Conference on May 23–24 offered an opportunity for a wide range of defense officials and experts from member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to exchange views on the future of Euro-Atlantic security with their Russian counterparts. Russia’s leading... MORE

For the past several days, Georgian politicians and experts have extensively discussed the alarming development of the situation around the village of Ditsi (https://en.ria.ru/world/20130527/181373355.html), located at the border between Georgia and South Ossetia. The government in Tbilisi considers this boundary “administrative” and is invariably sensitive... MORE

Insolvent Greece is auctioning off its state assets, both as a matter of necessity and as a condition imposed by international creditors for bailing out the country. The state-controlled natural gas company, DEPA/DESFA, is by far the most valuable asset in the Greek privatization package.Russian... MORE

On May 29, the respected Russian newspaper Vedomosti published an analytical article on the situation in the North Caucasus. Expressing a view rarely articulated by Russian experts, he described the processes in the region as “the continuation of the disintegration of the USSR” and “anticolonial.”... MORE

The Russia–European Union summit opens today (June 3) in Yekaterinburg, according to the twice-yearly schedule and amidst mutual irritation and disappearing expectations. Quarrels about the Syrian calamity are unavoidable. The talks will likely be fruitless, with Moscow expressing disappointment over the EU’s lifting of the... MORE

After the Crimean (a.k.a. Eastern) war of 1853–1856 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1856 ending that war, the Russian Empire began to turn toward the final conquest of the Caucasian mountaineers.  Russia was finally able to turn an army of 200,000... MORE