Tajikistan faces a deteriorating security situation following the escape of 25 high-profile prisoners from a detention center in Dushanbe run by the State Committee for National Security (GKNB) on August 23. The convicts escaped less than one week after they had been sentenced to lengthy... MORE

On September 14 in Baku, the heads of state endorsed the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector (AGRI), a project to import natural gas from Azerbaijan to Romania and onward to Hungary. The project involves the liquefaction of gas for shipment by tankers across the Black Sea from Georgia... MORE

“CORF [Collective Operational Reaction forces] will be no worse than NATO,” claimed Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, only one year ago. Today, these words are used in Russia to popularize the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the CORF within the post-Soviet space. They are also... MORE

On September 13, Russian Defense Minister, Anatoliy Serdyukov, and his Kyrgyz counterpart, Abibilla Kudayberdiyev, discussed the possibility of opening a Russian military training center in the southern city of Osh. The proposal comes almost one year after Washington and Bishkek began discussing the possibility of... MORE

As the Kyrgyz parliamentary campaign officially began on September 10, concerns mounted that major political parties will choose to use forceful methods to prevail over their competitors. Tensions are rising especially among parties that aspire to a majority in parliament and those that might fail... MORE

August 5 marked the fourth occasion in the last four years that the leaders of the Persian-speaking countries of Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan convened, this time in Tehran, to chart the future of their trilateral cooperation. The meeting, dubbed the “Persian summit,” led to a... MORE

The Caspian region is becoming enmeshed in a web of overlapping political, military, trade and energy interests of countries extending from Asia, to the Middle East, to Russia, to Europe. Given the rising instability of Middle East energy supplies, the Caspian basin has emerged in... MORE

On July 1, the Customs Union between Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus formally came into force. However, the occasion produced no cause for celebration among the members of the Customs Union. The reasons for such open pessimism over the future of this organization are becoming evident,... MORE

Kyrgyzstan’s top officials are against the deployment of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) 52-member Police Advisory Group. The OSCE can still “gracefully” cancel its decision to send the group to Kyrgyzstan, said Security Council Secretary Alik Orozov (www.akipress.kg, August 11). “The situation... MORE

More Kyrgyz political activists are speaking out against the prospective deployment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) 52-member Police Advisory Group. Infringement of the country’s sovereignty, limited capacity to improve the situation in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the potential for increased instability... MORE