In his recent year ender interview, Russian Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov provided a relatively smoothly crafted overview on the course of the reform launched in the fall of 2008 and the ongoing efforts to modernize weapons and equipment. Serdyukov’s comments to Rossiyskaya Gazeta addressed problems... MORE

The end of 2011 saw a spike in violence in Kabardino-Balkaria. A series of high profile-killings of law enforcement agents followed the killings of several suspected insurgents. On December 31, the commander of a special police unit in Kabardino-Balkaria, Colonel Murat Shkhagumov, was gunned down... MORE

Russia has sunk into the usual hibernation of long seasonal holidays, but quite unusually it now lives simultaneously in two very different new years. The first one was planned very carefully by the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, and it started on September 24 with his... MORE

On December 15, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held his now traditional annual phone-in press conference. During the phone-in, Putin mentioned the North Caucasus 21 times.  It appeared that the Prime Minister still credits himself for bringing Chechnya back under Moscow’s control, as he mentioned the... MORE

Russian foreign policy under Vladimir Putin is increasingly resorting to gunboat diplomacy (see EDM, December 12). However, another key element in Putin’s agenda has been his aggressive campaign to assert Russian interests in the Arctic. The aggressiveness has been manifested in earlier rhetorical exchanges and... MORE

The founder of the Dagestani independent weekly newspaper Chernovik, Khadzhimurad Kamalov, was shot to death In Makhachkala late yesterday (December 15). The incident took place around 11:30 pm, local time, near the newspaper’s offices in the Dagestani capital. Kavkazsky Uzel reported that the murder was... MORE

The end of the year is the time to review the year’s events. In the case of the North Caucasus, we can safely conclude that Russian authorities stopped hiding the fact that the situation in the region is alarming (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/195952/) and there are no signs... MORE

The “disbalance of interests” (see EDM, December 15), favoring Russia over the United States in the South Caucasus, used to be offset by superior US resources, attractiveness and credibility. But that offset has diminished as US policy turned toward de-prioritizing this region (compared with the... MORE

The OSCE’s year-end conference spotlighted the ineffectiveness of the “Minsk Group’s” co-chairs – Russia, the United States, and France – to mediate a solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. The OSCE is the only international forum officially authorized to mediate a solution to this conflict. The... MORE

The December 10 demonstration, gathered on Bolotnaya Square in downtown Moscow to protest massive election fraud during the December 4 Duma elections, was massive: the official count by state police was 25,000, while organizers claimed some 150,000. Independent calculations were of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters... MORE