In January, the Georgian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development approved its annual energy assessment (balance), which shows that Georgia will not purchase any natural gas from Russia this year. Instead, 99.65 percent of the 2.689 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas Georgia will consume... MORE

Zurab Abashidze, the Georgian prime minister’s special representative to Russia, held a meeting with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin in Prague, on January 31, within the framework of the bilateral informal dialogue launched in late 2012 (Civil Georgia, February 1). During such meetings, the... MORE

The foreign ministers of the five littoral Caspian states—Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran—met in Moscow, on December 5, 2017, to try to finalize an agreement on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. After the talks, the Azerbaijani and Russian representatives, Elmar Mammadyarov and... MORE

The Armenian government expects that the long-renegotiated Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between Armenia and the European Union, which was signed on November 24, 2017, will be ratified by the European Parliament by May 2019, at the latest (Armenpress.am, January 31). Meanwhile, Armenia itself... MORE

On January 27, residents of Georgia’s northeastern village of Duisi, in Pankisi gorge, largely populated by Kists, a 40,000-strong ethnic minority related to the Chechen people, demanded that Georgia’s State Security Service (SSS) and the Chief Prosecutor meet with them to discuss details of a... MORE

The constitutional amendments Armenia adopted in December 2015 provided for a fundamental change—shifting from a presidential to a parliamentary system, but establishing a transitional period until the end of Serzh Sargsyan’s second presidential term in 2018. The new president elected by the National Assembly in... MORE

On January 21, Musa Musayev, the mayor of Makhachkala, the capital city of Dagestan, was sentenced to ten days in jail before formal charges were brought against him (Chernovik.net, January 21). This is the second case in the last five years of a mayor of... MORE

The Russian-occupied Georgian region of Abkhazia was hit by a new political scandal on the eve of 2018. Its proximate cause did not appear overly significant at the time, and yet the turmoil it unleashed illustrates the unstable political climate of this breakaway territory. Specifically,... MORE

The President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev recently described 2017 as a year of recovery from the economic crisis for his country (President.az, January 10). Yet, at the same time, Azerbaijan, along with the other states of the South Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia, spent the past... MORE

On January 9, the so-called “president” of the Russian-backed “South Ossetian republic” (“Tskhinvali region”), Anatoly Bibilov, undertook a three-day visit to Republika Srpska, a constituent entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, he held a meeting with Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik and took part in the disputed Day of the Republic celebrations in the... MORE