At a conference in Batumi on July 10, President Mikheil Saakashvili and the government of Georgia along with Georgian NGOs unveiled a blueprint for the stage-by-stage resolution of the conflict in South Ossetia. Foreign envoys accredited in Tbilisi, American and European experts, Georgian government officials,... MORE

For the first time since the November 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's government has faced a large-scale, violent anti-governmental rally involving major opposition parties. The protest erupted June 30 on Tbilisi's central avenue after a court sentenced two popular wrestlers, Alexei Davitashvili, president... MORE

Reflecting the influence of the Armenian community in the United States, the U.S. Congress is blocking yet another attempt by the White House to sizably cut long-running American assistance to Armenia. The small South Caucasus state is thus due to remain one of the world's... MORE

On June 4, Russian federal troops conducted a mopping-up operation in the Chechen village of Borozdinovskaya, located in the north of the republic near the Dagestan border. This security sweep was a response to the rebel attacks that intensified in northern Chechnya this year (Chechnya... MORE

The situation in South Ossetia is still teetering between war and peace. Unidentified Ossetian gunmen kidnapped four Georgians from the ethnic Georgian-populated villages inside this breakaway region on June 6, and they are still missing. Search efforts by Georgian and Ossetian law enforcement and the... MORE

Armenia and Azerbaijan have reported further progress in their decade-long negotiations on the Karabakh enclave following the June 17 meeting of their foreign ministers in Paris. International mediators are now cautiously upbeat about prospects for resolving the most intractable ethnic dispute in the former Soviet... MORE

Azerbaijani authorities have become seriously concerned about the success of the opposition rally held on Saturday, June 18, in Baku. More than 20,000 members of the election block "Azadliq" (Freedom), which unites the three largest opposition parties in the country -- Musavat, the Popular Front,... MORE

May and early June brought intensified rebel attacks in Dagestan. On June 1, a bus carrying 20 policemen was bombed in Makhachkala, the capital (RIA-Novosti, June 1). Almost every night police patrols in the city are bombed, and the ambushes have recently spread to Khasavyurt.... MORE