The second week of January 2011 saw little let-up in apparent insurgency-related violence in the North Caucasus, with the largest number of reports coming out of Dagestan. On January 13, two men attacked a police unit in Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala, killing one policeman and wounding... MORE

The Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI) is a project of the Milano-based Edison with Depa, the Greek state-controlled gas transmission and trading company. ITGI proposes to carry 10 to 12 billion cubic meters (bcm) of “Caspian” gas per year, including 8 bcm to Italy and the remainder... MORE

A contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas has developed between three gas transport and trading projects: Nabucco, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI), and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP, geographically a continuation of the Turkish pipeline route into Greece, heading for Italy). All three are component projects... MORE

In 2010, rights activists in the North Caucasus continued to come under strong pressure from the Russian government. Most notoriously, in September 2010, Chechnya’s ruler Ramzan Kadyrov filed a libel case against head of the Memorial human rights center, Oleg Orlov. Following the killing of... MORE

By the end of 2010, the Russian government’s policy toward the North Caucasus unexpectedly received perhaps the strongest setback right on the Moscow streets. On December 11, 2010 a crowd of Russian nationalists estimated to be 5,000 people staged riots near the Kremlin, shouting such... MORE

Stakeholders in Nabucco and other Southern Corridor pipeline consortiums, as well as Shah Deniz project stakeholders in Azerbaijan, the European Commission, and many observers consider that investment decisions are a must in the first half of 2011.If finalized at this juncture, the investment decisions would... MORE

The European Commission’s President, Jose Manuel Barroso, and EU Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, are starting on January 13 an unprecedented joint visit to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. They are responding to Turkmenistan’s recent positive signals about supplies for the EU’s Nabucco transport project, but also to... MORE

Dagestan made the greatest contribution to the general trend of destabilization in the North Caucasus in 2010. Out of 178 deaths in terror attacks in the North Caucasus and Moscow in 2010, 68 occurred in or originated from Dagestan (38 percent). A total of 112... MORE

Moldova’s Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has won a new, and potentially longer, lease on life, after 16 months of insecure governance (EDM, January 7). Its post-election government is due to be installed on January 14. The AEI’s success, however hard-won, shows the European Union’s... MORE

After almost four years of construction, the Oguz-Gabala-Baku water pipeline was inaugurated on December 28, 2010. Costing almost $1 billion, the pipeline is already termed by many in Azerbaijan as the “second BTC,” referring to the strategically important Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline built a decade ago to... MORE