Several days prior to the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, peculiar events started to take place at the Russian-Georgian border. According to multiple accounts, Georgian border guards unexpectedly stopped allowing some residents of the North Caucasus to cross at the Upper Lars... MORE

At the meeting of the Russian Ministry for Regional Development on February 4, Dagestan’s leader Ramazan Abdulatipov said the central government in Moscow should give the regions the right to administer regional resources if it cannot do it properly itself. Abdulatipov provided an example, noting... MORE

Russian natural gas exports to Germany grew to 40.2 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2013, a hefty increase over the preceding year’s 33.2 bcm, according to Gazprom’s sales report for 2013 (Interfax, January 16, 2014).A growing share of that increasing volume enters Germany through the... MORE

During peacetime, a key function of the General Staff, Ministry of Defense, and key components of them like the Academy of Military Sciences is to determine the nature of contemporary war and the ensuing responsibilities of the armed forces. To judge from the remarks given... MORE

An article in a Russian online military journal reports that some Kazan Tatar nationalists and Islamists are calling for the launch of a Euromaidan-style protest movement inside the Russian Federation. The article is a transparent effort to discredit the Ukrainian version by linking it to... MORE

On February 5, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff (CGS), Army-General Valeriy Gerasimov, published an article on the role of the General Staff in Voyenno Promyshlennyy Kuryer. The article refers to changes to this role based on a presidential decree issued in 2013. Though the... MORE

Hungary’s Fidesz-led government under Viktor Orban, conservative and Europe-oriented in a traditionalist sense, and strongly anti-communist ever since Fidesz’s formative years, has turned toward Russia for solutions to some of Hungary’s main economic problems, especially in the energy sector. This government seems convinced, for example,... MORE

On February 7, as the Winter Olympics were opening in Sochi, police in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, violently dispersed a peaceful protest by Circassian activists. Thirty-seven protesters in the republic’s capital were arrested, their flags and banners, some reading “Sochi Is the Land of Genocide,” were confiscated.... MORE

The opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games (February 7) was just about picture-perfect, and the sizeable legion of critics, including most of the home-grown disbelievers in the ability of the ruling plutocracy to organize this mega-event, had to eat their words. It is... MORE

On February 6, Hungary’s parliament approved the Russian-Hungarian agreement for cooperation on nuclear energy. Under the agreement, Rosatom shall build two nuclear power blocs in Hungary, financed by Russian state credit. Hungary’s conservative government, led by the Fidesz party and enjoying a parliamentary supermajority (slightly... MORE