Astrakhan is a port city on the lower part of the Volga River and a large military harbor on the Caspian Sea. To the east, Astrakhan region borders Kazakhstan; to the west, the region faces the North Caucasus. Its proximity to that unstable area is... MORE

After a year of sparring with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov over several dozen hectares of disputed land, the president of Ingushetia decided to distinguish himself in yet another field. According to official information, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov has been strenuously trying to purge the republican interior ministry’s... MORE

Russia and Iran have become allies in the Syrian crisis, together providing military and financial assistance and advanced armaments that are essential to keep the regime of Bashar al-Assad in power. This increasingly close alliance has been giving more clout to those in Moscow who... MORE

Much has been and will be said about the 150th anniversary of the Circassian “genocide” by Russian forces that will be marked in 2014 when the site of that mass murder is scheduled to be the venue of the Winter Olympics. But this week marks... MORE

The high expectations on the part of Circassians of benevolence from the Russian state were cut short by the Russian government’s attitude toward the repatriation of the Syrian Circassians. “Even in a ‘life-and-death’ situation, Russia will never help us,” the well-known Circassian activist Andzor Kabard... MORE

On July 28, Vladimir Putin completed a working visit to Kyiv that immediately caused controversy about the outlook of Ukrainian-Russian relations. The Russian president had a brief meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yanukovych, on July 27 while attending the official celebration of the 1025th... MORE

As the hullabaloo died down after staging a military exercise in the Russian Far East on July 13–20, senior officials soon acknowledged underlying systemic weaknesses within the Armed Forces. Commentators noted the massive scale of the so-called “snap inspection,” which included 160,000 personnel, involving five... MORE

On July 27, President Vladimir Putin met in Moscow with Aleksandr Khloponin, his plenipotentiary representative in the North Caucasian Federal District. Khloponin informed the Russian president about his work to improve the socio-economic and political situation in this volatile region (https://kremlin.ru/news/16066). He boasted of cutting... MORE

Last week, Alexei Navalny re-entered the Moscow mayoral election campaign after his implausible release from jail the day after being condemned to five years behind bars on a blatantly fabricated charge. His team has jump-started the work in earnest, mobilizing volunteers for door-to-door persuasion, distributing... MORE

On July 17, the Kabardino-Balkarian interior minister summed up the results of the first six months of the year during a press conference in the republican capital, Nalchik. The minister was forced to admit that the government had failed to achieve decisive results in the... MORE