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

Nowadays, the leader of each North Caucasian republic is expected to select either the Chechen path of development or the Kabardino-Balkarian path. The Chechen path is crude, concentrating all power and resources into one person’s hands. The Kabardino-Balkarian path is about professing calmness and being... MORE

Moscow should have been in the midst of its annual mid-summer dead season, with millions of Muscovites heading to the sea in Turkey, or Crimea, or to their small dacha plots out of town. The endemic Moscow traffic jams have eased substantially until the end... MORE

On July 17, a frequent writer on Circassian topics, Andrei Yepifantsev, attacked Circassian activists for “nationalism” and pushing for help to the Syrian Circassians caught in the civil war in that Middle Eastern country. “Three primary themes of the Circassian nationalist movement are recognition of... MORE

The announcement by Vladimir Tor, the leader of the unregistered far-right National Democratic Party (NDP), that he will support anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny in the election for Moscow mayor (https://lenta.ru/news/2013/06/20/navalny/) may have gone unnoticed in the West, but it is one of the most interesting... MORE

Nearly 10,000 Chechens have sought political asylum in Germany since the start of 2013, an unprecedented number that is nearly six times as great as the flow a year earlier—and greater than the number of Afghans and Syrians doing so in the course of the... MORE

On July 12, during a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Army-General Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s commander-in-chief ordered a “surprise inspection” of combat forces in the country’s Far East. In the early hours of July 13, according to the defense ministry website, a “snap... MORE

Ukraine is preparing to take part in air defense exercises with Russia and Belarus and a multilateral air force exercise in Kazakhstan, all to be held by November 2013 (https://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/200/2013). Minsk and Astana are key Russian allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and... MORE

Russia’s Ministry of Energy and Gazprom want the European Commission to exempt the biggest pipelines in Germany, OPAL and NEL, from the European Union’s energy market legislation. OPAL and NEL are Gazprom’s joint ventures with Wintershall in Germany. The EU’s Third Legislative Package requires vertically... MORE