The Sochi Olympics and issues related to the refugees from Syria have dominated the political discourse in the Northwest Caucasus for most of this year. The surprising Russian-Ukrainian crisis has also had reverberations in this part of the Caucasus. Hostility between Kyiv and Moscow prompted... MORE

Yazidis, an Iraqi minority, have started arriving as refugees in Europe, where they encounter people who are supposedly causing their problems back at home, including the Chechens. A conflict between such refugees and Chechens erupted in the small German town of Celle, which is close... MORE

Since Russia occupied Crimea with its strategically important naval port and the Russian military base in Sevastopol this past February (UNIAN, February 27), life there has become increasingly dangerous for those who do not share the political views of the Russian leadership. It was the... MORE

Two years ago, in October 2012, Georgia experienced a peaceful, non-violent, constitutional change of power for the first time in the country’s modern history. The first president of the Republic of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who was elected on May 26, 1991, was overthrown by armed... MORE

On September 30, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the fall 2014 Russian military draft. The government is expected to draft 154,100 men, the same number as in the spring 2014 draft campaign. The Russian laws on the draft will be extended to newly-annexed... MORE

As civil war rages in Syria, Circassians there are trying to escape to other countries, but few of them have been able to return to their historical homeland in the North Caucasus. A handful of the Circassians ended up in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, where Circassians are the... MORE

Practically every month, Moscow boastfully announces it has killed a leader of one of the territorial branches of the Islamic underground armed resistance. However, the statistics regularly provided by Russian authorities concerning the insurgency raise doubts about the authenticity of these claims. Indeed, the number... MORE

Someone looking at a map of the Caucasus would be surprised to see that only three transportation links cut across the Main Caucasus Ridge connecting the North and South Caucasus. This was not always the case. Prior to the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus... MORE

On September 23, Foreign Policy magazine’s “The Cable” blog reported that Georgia offered to host a training center for Washington-backed Syrian rebels in order to aid the US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS—formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS)... MORE

Dagestan’s gross regional product is a little more than $2,000 per capita. By many economic indicators, Russian economists say, Dagestan is not only far behind many other Russian regions, but is at the level of some of the world’s poorest nations. Economic underdevelopment has been... MORE