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

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 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

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

The year 2017 could be considered a tranquil one for Armenia’s domestic and international political life. It passed without a repeat of anything as violent or dramatic as, for instance, the “four-day war”—the outbreak of clashes along the line of contact in Karabakh, between April... MORE

On November 22, 2017, Ahmed Chataev, the leader of a Russian-speaking faction of Islamic State (IS), was killed, along with two other militants, during a siege by Georgian special forces of an apartment block in Tbilisi. Following a 20-hour skirmish, according to Georgian officials, Chataev... MORE

Taking into consideration post-Soviet Georgia’s usually dramatic political life, the year 2017 was not particularly spectacular domestically or internationally. And yet, there were certain developments that will likely have strong and lasting effects on the country’s future, at least in the medium term. Last year... MORE

Following a turbulent chain of events, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia and the opposition activist leader of the Ukrainian Rukh Novykh Syl, last week found himself under house arrest in his Kyiv apartment. But today, on December 11, in yet another plot twist,... MORE

Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey signed a new agreement dedicated to launching the Lapis Lazuli transit corridor during a pentalateral meeting at the seventh Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan (RECCA), held on November 15, in Ashgabat (Azernews, November 15). The finalized document was... MORE