On November 7, the Circassian activist group Justice for the North Caucasus issued an emergency statement on the situation in Syria. The group called on the international community to send “relief to hundreds of men, women, children and elderly who have been under siege for... MORE

The Russian political class had hardly any time last week to contemplate the consequences of US President Barack Obama’s re-election for a second term or to follow the tense atmosphere at the 18th Communist Party Congress in Beijing—it was the cutthroat clash of Kremlin clans... MORE

The Petersburg Politics Foundation along with the Regnum news agency recently produced a joint assessment of socio-political stability in Russia’s regions, using a ten-point scale, and identified three North Caucasian republics—Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan—as being among the worst (https://slon.ru/russia/top_15_neozhidannykh_sobytiy_v_rossiyskikh_regionakh-848640). According to the president of the... MORE

Bulgaria has tied the approval of the South Stream gas pipeline to favorable terms in the upcoming gas supply contract with Gazprom. According to an official statement from the Bulgarian government, “The condition for the approval and signing of the final investment agreement is the... MORE

Once a renowned resort republic, Kabardino-Balkaria nowadays is more often mentioned in the news not as a resort region known across Russia, but as a territory in which counter-terrorism operations are regularly conducted.Drawing on the example of the neighboring republics of Chechnya and Dagestan, authorities... MORE

On November 6, President Vladimir Putin sacked Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov (50), replacing him with Sergei Shoigu (57), who was appointed governor of the Moscow region last May after serving for more than 20 years as chief of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry (Ministerstvo po Chrezvychaynym... MORE

On October 23, a suspected suicide bomber destroyed a police checkpoint on the administrative border between Ingushetia and North Ossetia. One police officer died in the attack and several others were injured. The power of the bomb was estimated at 50 kilograms of TNT. The... MORE

Mintimir Shaimiyev, the former president of Tatarstan whose views both reflect and help power the ideas of other non-Russian leaders, has issued a sweeping indictment of the current central Russian government for continuing to be in thrall to “a nostalgia for imperial thinking,” for seeking... MORE

At the heart of the reform of Russia’s Armed Forces, launched in October 2008, was the aim to create “permanent readiness” brigades, principally to facilitate rapid deployment and enhance combat capability and combat readiness. It is now a source of furrowed brows among the country’s... MORE

At the convention of the new Russian political party Grazhdanskaya Platforma (Civil Platform) in Moscow on October 27, one of its leaders, billionaire-turned-politician Mikhail Prokhorov, proposed abolishing the republics within the Russian Federation. He advocated changing the Russian constitution to redraw its administrative borders in... MORE