Following the devaluation of Azerbaijan’s national currency, the manat, in December 2015—the second in a year—the public has struggled to understand how this policy will affect their daily lives. The impact has become clearer during the first month of 2016: salaries have dropped dramatically, and... MORE

Azerbaijan, the third largest oil producer in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) after Russia and Kazakhstan, shifted to a floating exchange rate regime on December 21, 2015, triggered by a rapid fall in oil prices. For the long term Azerbaijan had almost a constant... MORE

The deterioration of Turkey-Russia ties on the one hand and Iran–Saudi Arabia relations on the other have been a major source of worry for the Azerbaijani authorities over the past year. The leadership officially acknowledged this concern last week (January 10) (APA, January 10). However,... MORE

Moscow’s plans to push through a law establishing criminal penalties for those who deny that the 1915 events in the Ottoman Empire were a “genocide” have sparked unusual dissent among members of the Azerbaijani diaspora in the Russian Federation. This, in turn, has raised speculation... MORE

In Yerevan, on December 23, the energy ministers of Armenia, Georgia, and Iran as well as the chief executive of the Rosseti joint-stock company, which manages Russia’s power distribution grids, signed a memorandum on cooperation in the energy sphere. According to the Armenian Ministry of... MORE

The bombshell of late November was the postponement of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s visit to Moscow, where he was supposed to have met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The official reason given—that both sides were too busy to meet—is rather dubious. Indeed, Putin’s schedule... MORE

Clashes between the police and residents of the long-troubled Absheron peninsula city of Nardaran, on November 25–26, have resulted in numerous arrests and deaths. These deadly incidents have sparked concerns that Azerbaijan may be on the brink of more widespread religious-based conflicts of the kind... MORE

On October 27, in Baku, representatives of the Council of Europe and the European Union presented several new projects to be implemented in the six Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries—Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia as well as Azerbaijan. The two European organizations have allocated 4.7 million... MORE

The leader of Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev, arrived in Georgia, on November 5, for a two-day official visit (Vestnik Kavkaza, November 5). This was Aliyev’s first trip to Tbilisi in a decade, and the talks he held there with Georgian officials were particularly tense. Cooperation... MORE

As part of a regional visit, the co-chairs (representatives of the United States, France and Russia) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group visited the Armenian capital of Yerevan on October 26. The next day, they traveled to Karabakh and met... MORE