*To read Part One, please click here.   While Mikheil Saakashvili served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Province (May 2015–November 2016), the region presented the former Georgian president with hurdles not only to system reforms but even to rational management as such. Those obstacles included:... MORE

Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has accepted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to chair the Executive Committee of Ukraine’s National Council for Reforms (Ukrinform, May 7). Taking up the new challenge, Saakashvili promised to draw on the experience of his universally recognized achievements in Georgia... MORE

The pandemic and the partially related collapse in oil prices will lead to the highest budget deficit in the Russian regions for the past 20 years, despite the support of the central government, says a recent assessment by the global credit rating agency S&P. Regions... MORE

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the ongoing disinformation campaign in Armenia. Old and new false claims and biased narratives have been actively promoted in recent weeks by multiple actors, foreign and domestic. A Russian propaganda campaign pursuing geopolitical objectives has, to a large extent, overlapped... MORE

With nearly 2,000 officially confirmed COVID-19 cases, the Republic of Dagestan is currently the most badly hit territory in the North Caucasus. Furthermore, the republic has the fifth-largest number of cases in the Russian Federation. Some Dagestani municipalities report that they cannot cope with the... MORE

Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called on the Russian government to “refrain from provocative statements” and “disinformation” against the Center for Public Health Research, located near Tbilisi and named after the late United States Senator Richard Lugar (Kavkazsky Uzel, April 19). A couple weeks... MORE

The Russian government long assumed that Western sanctions on Iran would allow it to steal a march on the world by expanding its railroad connections to the south via the Islamic Republic while simultaneously ensuring that the South Caucasus remains a Moscow-dominated hub for both... MORE

During a videoconference organized by the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addressed the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh, but his remarks greatly incensed Yerevan (Mid.ru, April 21). First, he expressed support for the current “firmly established format” of negotiations between Armenia and... MORE

The North Caucasus is beginning to show signs of destabilization, as pandemic-related restrictions and a poor economy expose societal fault lines. Regional governments imposed draconian self-isolation measures to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus but provided little or no relief to struggling businesses and... MORE

Following the large coronavirus outbreak in Iran, neighboring countries quickly closed their borders with the Islamic Republic. More than a thousand Turkish trucks carrying goods to Central Asia found themselves stuck at checkpoints due to the closure of the Iran-Turkey and Iran-Turkmenistan borders (Daily Sabah,... MORE