Hours before Kazakhstan’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov started his first official visit to the Russian Federation, one of Russia’s daily newspapers reported that the country’s foreign ministry had addressed a diplomatic note to its Kazakhstani counterpart with regard to the issue of the... MORE

On December 21, 2012, Georgian Prime-Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili dropped a bombshell, stating that ongoing construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, connecting Azerbaijan to northeastern Turkey via Georgia, raised many questions about its economic efficiency and profitability for Georgia, regardless of the project’s geopolitical importance (www.geopalitratv.ge,... MORE

January brought unexpected news from Chechnya. In the course of a six-day military operation against the militants in the republic’s Vedeno district, government forces killed 11 militants and captured one (www.rbc.ru/fnews.open/20130124152140.shtml). The government forces also suffered losses—two servicemen died and seven were wounded in fighting... MORE

Since the rebellion against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began almost two years ago, many in the West and in the Arab World have eagerly awaited evidence of Moscow beginning to finally ditch the brutal and seemingly doomed Syrian regime. In an interview... MORE

Already unstable relations between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan worsened this week. Violence had erupted in early January 2013 in the Uzbekistani enclave of Sokh located inside Kyrgyzstan that resulted in property damage and hostages being taking. Since January 7, Bishkek continues to block access to Uzbekistan’s... MORE

Turkey–European Union relations were frozen while Cyprus held the rotating EU presidency during the second half of 2012. In those six months, no progress was made in Turkey’s European integration, and very few official visits took place between Turkish and EU delegations. Signifying the tense... MORE

On January 9, Russia’s State Duma rejected Circassians’ calls for the Russian government to treat the Syrian Circassians as compatriots. In a response to a Russian parliamentary query, the head of the department of inter-ethnic relations of the Russian Ministry for Regional Development, Alexander Zhuravsky,... MORE

On January 15–16, President Vladimir Putin held talks in Moscow with Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sekh Hasina. As a result of these discussions, Russia has pledged to lend Bangladesh $1 billion to buy weapons, $500 million to construct the country’s first nuclear plant, as well as... MORE

Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili signed a decree on January 21, stripping Minister of Defense Irakly Alasania of his dual position as deputy prime minister in the Georgian government https://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=25670). The decree appeared on the government’s website (https://www.government.gov.ge/index.php?lang_id=geo&sec_id=1) one day after Alasania revealed he had had... MORE

The Russian government’s requirement that human rights organizations receiving financial assistance from abroad register as foreign agents and the unwillingness of Russian businessmen to cross the Kremlin by making up the shortfalls is hurting human rights groups across the country. But in the North Caucasus,... MORE