On October 15, Baku hosted the 12th summit of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). The presidents of Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as the prime minister of Turkey attended the event. ECO was established in 1985 as a regional, inter-state economic organization... MORE

The Petersburg Politics Foundation along with the Regnum news agency recently produced a joint assessment of socio-political stability in Russia’s regions, using a ten-point scale, and identified three North Caucasian republics—Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan—as being among the worst (https://slon.ru/russia/top_15_neozhidannykh_sobytiy_v_rossiyskikh_regionakh-848640). According to the president of the... MORE

Bulgaria has tied the approval of the South Stream gas pipeline to favorable terms in the upcoming gas supply contract with Gazprom. According to an official statement from the Bulgarian government, “The condition for the approval and signing of the final investment agreement is the... MORE

Once a renowned resort republic, Kabardino-Balkaria nowadays is more often mentioned in the news not as a resort region known across Russia, but as a territory in which counter-terrorism operations are regularly conducted.Drawing on the example of the neighboring republics of Chechnya and Dagestan, authorities... MORE

The latest World Bank (WB)/International Finance Corporation (IFC) Doing Business 2013 (DB) report reveals remarkable progress achieved by Kazakhstan in creating a business-friendly environment: it ranks 49th out of 185 countries surveyed. Especially impressive is the country’s improvement in one of the key indicators—ease of... MORE

In a little-noticed development last month, a senior Armenian military official has announced Armenia’s willingness to use military force against Azeri economic facilities in the event of an outbreak of war in Karabakh. On October 15, Major General Artak Davtyan, Chief of the Operative Department,... MORE

On November 6, President Vladimir Putin sacked Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (50), replacing him with Sergei Shoigu (57), who was appointed governor of the Moscow region last May after serving for more than 20 years as chief of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry (Ministerstvo po Chrezvychaynym... MORE

On October 22, about 450 villagers threatened to destroy the offices of the Chinese company Zijin Mining Group in the village of Orlovka in northern Chui province in Kyrgyzstan. The attack occurred after a villager’s horse was killed by a staff member of the company.... MORE

On November 5, the Russian company ROSSPEN published the memoirs of former chairman of the Parliament Stanislau Shushkevich, the first leader of Belarus after independence. The book came out in a Russian-language edition because none of Belarus’s publishers dared to issue the original in Belarusian.... MORE

On October 23, a suspected suicide bomber destroyed a police checkpoint on the administrative border between Ingushetia and North Ossetia. One police officer died in the attack and several others were injured. The power of the bomb was estimated at 50 kilograms of TNT. The... MORE