Since President Vladimir Putin appointed Army-General Sergei Shoigu as Russia’s defense minister in November 2012, a number of subtle changes to the structure and organization of the Armed Forces indicate that the “Serdyukov reform”—a wide-ranging military reform program initiated by previous Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov—is... MORE

From its first days in power, the Georgian Dream coalition government under Bidzina Ivanishvili unilaterally set out to improve relations with Russia, and it has taken a series of unilateral steps toward that end. The government’s initiative stems from domestic, regional, and global considerations.Domestically, Georgian... MORE

Three Mongolian political parties with seats in the current parliament have nominated their candidates for the country’s sixth presidential election, which is scheduled for June 26, 2013, under the 1992 constitution. After the completion of administrative and legal background checks, the General Election Commission formally... MORE

As the details of the arrest of the mayor of Makhachkala, Said Amirov, continue to emerge, experts predict a dangerous power vacuum in the republic. Amirov was arrested by Russian special forces at his home in Makhachkala on June 1 in a military-style operation. According... MORE

The explosion of public protests in Istanbul makes a strong but ambivalent impression on the development of the vacillating political crisis in Russia; the state-controlled Russian television channels prefer to give them minimal and unsympathetic coverage, focusing instead on the flooding in Prague or tornadoes... MORE

On May 19–20, the President of Tajikistan Emomalii Rahmon paid a state visit to China where he had talks with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and with several heads of Chinese state corporations. Rahmon’s official visit resulted in several multi-million-dollar investment projects in the infrastructure,... MORE

The existential reality of Belarus, squeezed between Russia and the European Union, is its crucial dependency on external geopolitical factors. If anything, the recent slump in Belarus’s exports exacerbates this dependency. In the first quarter of 2013, exports decreased by 20.5 percent compared with the... MORE

Dagestan is interesting not only because it is the largest republic of the region, but also because it has by far the strongest Salafist armed resistance in the North Caucasus. That is why every political event in this North Caucasian republic becomes an important topic... MORE

The notorious spring season in Kyrgyzstan was again marked by intensified protest activity this year. On May 31, protesters demanding the nationalization of the locally-based Kumtor gold mine clashed with security forces in a northern district of Jeti-Oguz of the Issyk-Kul province in what was... MORE

Against the background of the unfolding situation around the Chechen brothers accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the killing in Florida of another Chechen connected to the brothers, Ibragim Todashev, the killing of a Chechen in Turkey... MORE