Insurgency-related violence took place throughout the North Caucasus this past week, with incidents reported in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Chechnya. A freight train was the target of a bombing in Dagestan today (July 2). The incident took place on the Manas-Achi railway line around 5:25... MORE

An international court has obliged Naftohaz Ukrainy, the state-controlled oil and gas behemoth, to pass 12 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas and $192 million to RosUkrEnergo (RUE), a joint venture of Gazprom and the Ukrainian businessman, Dmytro Firtash. This is a heavy defeat for... MORE

The US and Russian presidents’ nibbling at hamburgers has had little, if any, effect on the situation in the North Caucasus. Even the US State Department’s decision to designate Doku Umarov as a would-be threat to American interests (www.rus.ruvr.ru, June 24) might be seen as... MORE

A group of ten alleged Russian spies have been arrested in the US by the FBI and another individual in Cyprus in response to an American request. The alleged spies were accused of using distorted or falsified identities to infiltrate the US to gather sensitive... MORE

Demand for Azerbaijani natural gas is surging, with potential buyers scrambling to Baku. The gas transit agreements, signed by Azerbaijan and Turkey on June 7, have opened prospects for unimpeded transportation of Azeri gas to consumer countries via Georgia and Turkey. These agreements, and consequent... MORE

Piracy has a long history and the struggle with it is closely tied to concepts of national sovereignty, freedom of the seas, and the protection of life and property at sea. In 1609, Hugo Grotius, (1583-1645), the great Dutch legal theorist, provided the legal foundation... MORE

Moldova’s governing Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has split yet again, this time over a historical assessment of Soviet rule and Communism in Moldova. On June 28, leaders of three parties, out of the AEI’s four, cancelled literally at the last minute the Parliament’s session... MORE

On June 22, the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau published an article by Andreas Förster entitled “Georgian Mafia Planned a Coup,” in which it was stated that part of the Georgian political opposition received funds from Georgian organized crime networks in Europe to foment unrest in... MORE

The clashes between Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks in the Osh and Jalalabad regions of Kyrgyzstan forced the Uzbek and Kazakh Presidents, Islam Karimov and Nursultan Nazarbayev, to abandon their rivalry and contemplate ways of cooperating in the face of the growing impact of the Kyrgyz... MORE

Just as the worst crisis since the events in Osh in 1990 has erupted in southern Kyrgyzstan, resulting in bloodshed and large-scale internal displacement of ethnic Uzbeks, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has also faced its most severe test to date. Repeated requests... MORE