At the end of July, the governor of Adygea, Aslan Tkhakushinov, and the chief of the Kuban Cossack Forces, Nikolai Doluda, unexpectedly announced that the Cossacks would start conducting public safety patrols in the republic. The Kuban Cossack Forces are based in Krasnodar region and... MORE

Amid the continuous stream of news coming out of eastern Ukraine—not least the post-modern invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces—the upcoming regional elections in Russia have largely escaped notice. Elections for regional legislatures and governors were reinstated by then-president Dmitry Medvedev, partly to meet protesters’... MORE

Ukraine has been “coerced to peace” by Russia after five months of hostilities, as Georgia was in 2008 after five days. Russia’s hybrid war methods, rehearsed already against Georgia and deployed fully against Ukraine, proved indecisive, until Russia escalated to the level of conventional war... MORE

On September 4, China’s State Council announced a series of ambitious and wide-reaching reforms of the Chinese college admissions system, designed to increase fairness and reduce pressure on China’s high school students. China’s infamous college admissions test, the gaokao, will be restructured, replacing a single... MORE

Following deadly attacks in Beijing, Kunming and Urumqi over the last year, the Xinjiang government has intensified its efforts to regulate Uyghur religious activities. The provincial government has once again reinforced its ban on Ramadan fasting for Uyghur civil servants and students in 2014, as... MORE

Since 2013, increasing numbers of Uyghurs from Xinjiang Province have attempted to migrate illegally through China’s South Asian neighbors—Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia—to Thailand and then Malaysia, often with the hope of flying to Turkey. This trend marks a change from the 1990s and mid-2000s,... MORE

This week (September 7), more than 300 Cossacks, Russian Orthodox hierarchs, Moscow officials, and researchers assembled in the Russian North Caucasus city of Stavropol. They gathered to discuss the enormous and ever increasing gap between the way Cossacks are presented in the Russian and international... MORE

The September 5 Minsk meeting of the Contact Group (CG) on Ukraine that resulted in a ceasefire deal continues to reverberate in the global media as does the overall conflict in Ukraine. For Belarus, two sets of issues appear noteworthy: the statements of the meeting’s... MORE

On June 29, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) declared the emergence of an Islamic caliphate and renamed itself the Islamic State (IS). The organisation proclaimed that all existing Muslim states should support and provide their allegiances to the Caliphate, which according to... MORE

Mariupol illustrates the failure of Russia’s Novorossiya’s project to attract popular support in southeastern Ukraine. That project might have been expected to meet with success in many large cities, including Mariupol. This city of 500,000 (second-largest in the Donetsk province) is thoroughly Russified linguistically, closely... MORE