On February 16, the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan addressed a letter to the speaker of the National Assembly, Galust Sahakyan, informing him about an executive decision to recall the Armenia-Turkey Protocols from the parliament. Signed in Zurich, in 2009, under the mediation of the United... MORE

On February 21, the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) devalued the country’s currency, the manta, by 33.5 percent against the US dollar, and 30 percent against the euro. On the day of the devaluation, the national currency was rated at 1.05 manat to the dollar,... MORE

A commonly held view in Russia is that the government consists of “a good tsar and bad boyars.” That is, the population tends to have a positive attitude about whoever sits at the top of the ruling hierarchy; while most, or even all, of the... MORE

More than in most parts of the world, the former Soviet space is a place where battles about the present and the future are waged over the past. Most famously, Russians and Ukrainians disagree profoundly whether Kievan Rus marked the beginning of Russian statehood, as... MORE

On January 2–3, clashes took place along the Line of Contact between Azerbaijan and the unrecognized, Armenian-backed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), resulting in casualties on both sides. Though a cease-fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan was reached in 1994, it has regularly been violated for more than... MORE

On January 7, unidentified assailants vandalized the tomb of Seid Mir-Gafar-aga in Derbent, Dagestan (see EDM, January 13, 15). The tomb is a place of worship for ethnic Azerbaijanis and the act of vandalism sparked tensions between the Azerbaijani community and the rest of the... MORE

Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs held its Annual Ambassadors Conference on January 5–6, where the overall vision and various aspects of Turkey’s foreign policy were reviewed and discussed (Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 6). The year 2015 will be highly significant and particularly challenging... MORE

By the end of 2014, Azerbaijan and Georgia had already completed the construction of their own sections of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars Railway (BTK), which will connect the South Caucasus with Europe via Turkey (APA Agency, January 7, 2015). With its Azerbaijani portion finalized back in 2008,... MORE

Relations between ethnic Azerbaijanis and the Dagestani peoples in the North Caucasus republic’s southern city of Derbent have reached a boiling point. Two new acts of vandalism—one against a grave of a Muslim leader venerated by Azerbaijanis and a second against a monument to Nizami,... MORE

As 2014 draws to a close, energy developments in the Eurasian region have been gaining new prominence. Notably, on December 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a state visit to Turkey to attend the fifth meeting of the Turkish-Russian High-Level Cooperation Council (CNN Turk, December... MORE