Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Barack Obama will likely discuss Kazakhstan’s proposal to establish the world’s first international nuclear fuel bank when they meet at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul in a few weeks. In February, Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov (Kazakhstan General Newswire, February 28)... MORE

Security forces in Dagestan launched a special operation in the village of Novosasitli in the republic’s Khasavyurt district on March 7. According to eyewitnesses, about ten military vehicles, including trucks and armored personnel carriers, entered the village and blocked all roads leading in and out... MORE

Yevgeny Shevchuk’s election as “president” of Transnistria in December 2011 ended the 20-year rule of Igor Smirnov, belatedly replacing a Soviet with a post-Soviet leadership group. Shevchuk defeated the Kremlin-picked candidate (the Supreme Soviet’s fossilized chairman Anatoly Kaminski). Moscow campaigned to remove Smirnov as a... MORE

One of the weaknesses of Belarus’s geopolitical situation and indeed of its self-perception is that Belarus is a crossroads, a land in between. In many ways this cliché informs thinking about Belarus – while something of note is occurring within its borders, there is a... MORE

Six years to the day since their collapse (February 28, 2006), official negotiations on the Transnistria conflict were supposed to restart in Dublin in the 5+2 format (Russia, Ukraine, OSCE, United States, European Union, Chisinau, Tiraspol). The Dublin meeting on February 28-29, 2012 was to... MORE

The North Caucasus is the only part of Russia where the authorities engage in systematic abductions – a practice that has existed since the first war in Chechnya in the mid-1990s. According to the Center for Civil Assistance to the Search for Missing Persons in... MORE

On March 4, Vladimir Putin won a crushing electoral victory and ensured a third six-year term in the Kremlin as Russia’s president. The Central Election Commission (CEC) published the final official results: Putin received 63.6 percent of the popular vote. The Communist leader, Gennadiy Zyuganov,... MORE

As negotiations continue over the extension of Russia’s use of a military base in Tajikistan, the Central Asian country’s envoy to Russia suggests that his government wants Moscow to pay rent for operating the facility. Speaking to journalists on February 28, Abdulmajid Dostiev acknowledged that... MORE

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won the March 4 presidential elections in Russia, as most observers had been expecting. Despite his landslide victory with nearly 64 percent of vote, many analysts agree that Putin will no longer be able to treat the presidency as a sinecure... MORE

Already in 2012, two Iranian terrorist plots against Azerbaijan have been exposed, Moscow has substantially reinforced its garrisons in the Caucasus in expectation of a war involving Iran by this summer, and Russia has also warned Georgia against hosting US troops there for purposes of... MORE