On April 26, 2015, Kazakhstan held its fifth presidential election in a quarter-century of independent statehood (see EDM, April 30). Incumbent President Nursultan Nazarbayev was re-elected overwhelmingly for another five-year term, as pre-election opinion polls and Nazarbayev’s popularity ratings with Kazakhstan’s voters had foreshadowed. His... MORE

Dagestan is a special region of Russia in that it is an outpost of Islamic radicalism. Islamic institutions, madrasas and maktabs (Islamic elementary schools in mosques) exist in large numbers in the republic. Even though the number of Islamic educational institutions in the republic has... MORE

The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Uzbekistan has announced that between April 27 and May 8, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, embassy staff would distribute free “ribbons of St.... MORE

Preparations for the May 9 Victory Day ceremonies and military parade in Moscow have the city on edge. Repeated real-time rehearsals have been blocking traffic as armor and troop formations march time and again through downtown streets to Red Square and back again. The first... MORE

On May 2, Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev appointed a new prime minister—the Central Asian republic’s 27th since it became a sovereign state in 1991—Temir Sariyev, who had previously served as economy minister after Atambayev’s election to the presidency in December 2011. Earlier, on April 23,... MORE

Last week (May 1), Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili submitted his new cabinet appointments for approval by the parliament. The pro-Western Republican Party, which is part of the ruling Georgian Dream coalition, made substantial gains in the new cabinet. One of the leaders of the... MORE

Authorities in Kabardino-Balkaria have launched a campaign to give the Ubykhs, a Circassian sub-ethnic group, official small indigenous group status. That special status would allow the Ubykhs to claim many benefits from the Russian government, including property rights in Russia’s Krasnodar region, the homeland the... MORE

On April 29, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka delivered his annual address “to the people and the parliament.” By far the most frequently discussed excerpt from his remarks—however awkward and tangential it may have been to the actually significant topics of the 2-hour-and-40-minute speech—was Lukashenka’s digression devoted... MORE

Moscow has had little or no success in mobilizing ethnic Russians as a whole in Belarus against the current government in Minsk: the local Russian community, in almost all cases, blends easily with the Belarusian majority. But there is one group within that community with... MORE

As if trying to compensate for his recent “disappearance” in early March, President Vladimir Putin participated in a series of high-intensity meetings and public events last week. His domestic audiences included students and “heroes of labor”; instructions were issued to government ministers, members of the... MORE