On September 30, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the fall 2014 Russian military draft. The government is expected to draft 154,100 men, the same number as in the spring 2014 draft campaign. The Russian laws on the draft will be extended to newly-annexed... MORE

The September national survey by the Independent Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS), the most trusted Belarusian polling firm, headquartered in Lithuania, shows that both the electoral rating of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and public trust vested in him have gone up. Whereas in June,... MORE

Russia has now fallen to 51st place among the countries of the world in terms of the effectiveness of its medical system, behind Azerbaijan and Belarus. This decline reflects Vladimir Putin’s budgetary priorities, and it has boosted Russia’s mortality rate this year to 13.3 deaths... MORE

As civil war rages in Syria, Circassians there are trying to escape to other countries, but few of them have been able to return to their historical homeland in the North Caucasus. A handful of the Circassians ended up in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, where Circassians are the... MORE

The trickle of sad and sour economic news continues to exacerbate Russia’s stagnant economic outlook, but the Kremlin authorities remain resolutely indifferent to these negative trends. They presume that the arrival of a “technical” recession does not constitute a political challenge because the “below-middle” classes... MORE

Tashkent’s recent diplomatic efforts to serve and actively pursue its vital national interests may best be described by the mantra “a strategy is always square, but tactics are always round.” The attendance of the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, at the most recent summit of... MORE

Practically every month, Moscow boastfully announces it has killed a leader of one of the territorial branches of the Islamic underground armed resistance. However, the statistics regularly provided by Russian authorities concerning the insurgency raise doubts about the authenticity of these claims. Indeed, the number... MORE

Someone looking at a map of the Caucasus would be surprised to see that only three transportation links cut across the Main Caucasus Ridge connecting the North and South Caucasus. This was not always the case. Prior to the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus... MORE

The spirit of a new cold war seems to be dominating Russia. The Kremlin, outraged by the punitive sanctions imposed by the West in response to Russia’s incursions into Ukraine, is curtailing all available channels of communication with the outside world. This week, members of... MORE

On September 23, Foreign Policy magazine’s “The Cable” blog reported that Georgia offered to host a training center for Washington-backed Syrian rebels in order to aid the US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS—formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS)... MORE