On June 8 in Kayseri (Turkey), Nabucco project companies from the five transit countries –Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria– signed with those countries’ corresponding ministries the Project Support Agreements (PSAs) for the construction of the Nabucco pipeline. The five companies plus RWE of Germany... MORE

In an open letter on June 1, Circassian activists condemned derogatory and scandalous remarks about them made by Russian State Duma deputy Sergei Markov. The First Caucasian Information channel, a Tbilisi based Russian-language TV channel, asked several Russian public figures, including Markov, about Georgia’s recognition... MORE

*Visit the Jamestown blog on Russia and Eurasia (https://www.jamestown.org/blog) On June 10, former Colonel Yuri Budanov was gunned down in Moscow. His murder is expected to galvanize Russian nationalists. Already flowers were reportedly taken to the scene of the murder, and nationalist activists are reportedly... MORE

Former Russian army colonel Yury Budanov, who was convicted in 2003 of strangling to death an 18-year-old Chechen girl, Elza Kungaeva, while serving as a tank commander in Chechnya in 2000, was murdered today (June 10) in Moscow. Investigators said the car used by the... MORE

Moscow no longer expects that the situation in the North Caucasus region will improve any time soon. Even the Russian presidential envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Aleksandr Khloponin, has been forced to admit on several occasions that one should not expect any positive... MORE

On June 4, two masked men from North Ossetia calling themselves “members of the anti-Wahhabi resistance” were shown on the Russian NTV channel. In the interview, which was cited by Regnum news agency but not available on the TV channel’s website, the masked men said... MORE

On June 1-2, Russia’s Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights held a conference in Makhachkala, Dagestan. The heated discussions at the conference indicated the enormous explosiveness of the situation in the republic, which is rooted in complex political, social and... MORE

Russia’s Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights held a conference on June 1 – 2 in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, devoted to the situation in the republic. Participants painted a bleak picture of the state of human rights in Dagestan, and... MORE

On May 31, police in Kabardino-Balkaria reported that they prevented an attempt to assassinate the president of the republic, Arsen Kanokov. According to a police source, two roadside bombs, the biggest of them containing five kilograms of TNT, were placed at the entrance to the... MORE

(Part Two)Georgian-Israeli relations took a virtual nosedive as soon as the verdict of ‘guilty’ was handed down by the Tbilisi City Court on April 1, 2011, in the case Ron Fuchs and Ze’ev Frenkiel. Israel quickly stepped up its attacks with more sophisticated economic, political... MORE