Following multiple pledges of allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) by rebel amirs in Chechnya and Dagestan, a new statement, allegedly on behalf of all of the former amirs of the Caucasus Emirate appeared on the Internet on June 21 (Sitemultimedia.org, June 21). A voice... MORE

Members of the so-called Islamic State (IS) have been quite active in the Pankisi Gorge, one of the most picturesque mountain gorges in Georgia, since the very start of the conflicts involving the IS in Syria and Iraq. Pankisi, situated in the northeastern part of... MORE

Following last year’s annexation of Crimea, Russia’s initial tactic was to propagate multiple connections between the people on the peninsula and the country’s population. A year later, North Caucasian activists say that the Russian government is insulating Crimea from the North Caucasus and preventing the... MORE

In the 18 months since the Sochi Winter Olympics, Russian entrepreneurs and Russian officials have taken advantage of the lack of international attention to increase their destruction of the natural environment in and around Sochi, to further weaken the housing and infrastructure of residents there,... MORE

Russian news agencies reported in early June that Novgorod Oblast in central Russia had become the country’s first region to default on its financial obligations. An official from the Novgorod financial department told RBK news agency that the region failed to make a payment of... MORE

With more and more former members of the Caucasus Emirate pledging allegiance to the “caliphate” of the Islamic State, the situation in the North Caucasus may destabilize further. What is happening is not the disbanding of one rebel organization and its replacement with a more... MORE

Nearly seven years ago, in the fall of 2007, Islamic militants in the North Caucasus who were unhappy with the ideology of independence for Ichkeria replaced it with an Islamic ideology and declared the formation of the Caucasus Emirate (Kavkazsky Uzel, December 29, 2014). The... MORE

Russian analysts are beginning to wonder whether Moscow has grown tired of Chechnya’s ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, and wants to replace him. Recent attacks on human rights activists in Chechnya received unusually wide and negative media coverage in Russia, even though years of routine rights violations... MORE

Most analysts concerned with the Circassian issue in the North Caucasus have focused on the three republics where subgroups of that nation are the titular nationalities—Adygea, Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria—or on the enormous diasporas in Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere. But another player has emerged in the... MORE

Public figures rarely speak out against the existing political order in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, so the open letter from Nikolai Khokhlachyov, an ethnic-Russian activist in the republic, to Sergei Ivanov, the head of President Vladimir Putin’s administration, was surprising. Khokhlachyov called on Ivanov to appoint an ethnic... MORE