On November 11, the municipal court in Tbilisi decided to suspend the former chief of the Joint Staff of the armed forces of Georgia, General Giorgi Kalandadze, from office, having thereby satisfied the general prosecutors’ request (https://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=25438). The general is charged with beatings of six... MORE

At the beginning of November, Chechen authorities made several statements that were underreported by the media but which illuminated important aspects of Moscow’s policies in the North Caucasus. Moreover, those statements allow an assessment of how much autonomy Moscow is willing to grant to Chechnya... MORE

On November 8, the International Crisis Group presented two reports—titled “The North Caucasus: The Challenges of Integration (I), Ethnicity and Conflict,” and “The North Caucasus: The Challenges of Integration (II), Islam, the Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency”—at the Sakharov Center in Moscow. Apart from the conflict in... MORE

On November 1, Georgia’s new prime minister, the leader of the “Georgian Dream” coalition, Bidzina Ivanishvili, announced the creation of the position of the Prime Minister’s Special Representative for Relations with Russia. He appointed Zurab Abashidze, Georgia’s ambassador to Russia in 2000–2004, to the post... MORE

One of the closest associates of Georgia’s Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, State Minister for Reintegration Paata Zakareishvili, has unveiled the government’s idea to unblock the railway link that connected Russia with the South Caucasus republics in Soviet times.In an interview with the Moscow paper Kommersant... MORE

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

On October 15, Baku hosted the 12th summit of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). The presidents of Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as the prime minister of Turkey attended the event. ECO was established in 1985 as a regional, inter-state economic organization... 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

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

In a little-noticed development last month, a senior Armenian military official has announced Armenia’s willingness to use military force against Azeri economic facilities in the event of an outbreak of war in Karabakh. On October 15, Major General Artak Davtyan, Chief of the Operative Department,... MORE