Earlier this month, the well-known Dagestani weekly newspaper, Novoe Delo, attacked the mayor of the city of Derbent for what it regarded as a servile attitude toward neighboring Azerbaijan. Journalist Ramazan Rajabov wrote: “Against all the protests and clamor by the local Lezgin population, the... MORE

Russia is facing a new problem and this concerns the new front that the Chechens have launched outside the North Caucasus. As a result of the brutal suppression of the Chechen armed resistance, only three small groups are left in the republic: the group led... MORE

In Chechnya, yet another problem has been added to the set of existing ones. The Memorial human rights center has designated Ruslan Kutaev as a political prisoner on April 19 (memo.ru, April 19), and earlier this month (July 2014), Amnesty International (amnesty.org) and Human Rights... MORE

A Tbilisi city court has refused to release Gigi Ugulava, the former mayor of the Georgian capital, out on bail, instead sentencing him to two months in pre-trial detention. Ugulava is fighting a series of charges brought against him by the Prosecution and the investigative... MORE

The continuing tensions in Ukraine have resulted in over 21,000 refugees from eastern Ukraine receiving temporary shelter in Russia, according to Russia’s Ministry for Emergency Situations. The Central, Southern and North Caucasian federal districts received the majority of the refugees from Ukraine (gazeta.ru, July 12).... MORE

In the aul (village) of Afipsip in Adygea, Circassians are preparing to erect a statue of Kizbechu Sheretluko, a Circassian who fought the Russian advance into the North Caucasus in the 1830s. But they plan to place the statue next to a memorial to Soviet... MORE

Oleg Lyashko, the outspoken deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, published on the parliament’s official website his legislative proposal to recognize the 19th century Circassian “genocide” (cherkessia.net, July 8). Kabard also cast doubt on the genuineness of the primary partner of the ICA in... MORE

For the past 15 years, bloodshed has been commonplace in the North Caucasus and illegal actions by the regional authorities have not been considered criminal. And during that whole period, regional officials have found ways to use official statistics to cast the situation there in... MORE

Last month, the newly appointed leader of the Caucasus Emirate, Abu Muhammad, explained why Muslims should not support the head of the al-Qaeda breakaway group—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—but instead provide support to al-Qaeda leader Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri... MORE

On June 30, the Abkhaz separatist regime announced that it would remove from the voter lists 22,787 ethnic Georgians living in the Russian-occupied Abkhazia. The separatist regime officials claimed that those people acquired so-called “Abkhaz passports” illegally and hence, as non-citizens, they could not qualify... MORE