On February 5, President Nursultan Nazarbayev held his annual meeting with the foreign ambassadors and lead representatives of the local offices of major international organizations in Astana. More than 80 senior foreign diplomats accredited to Kazakhstan heard the president’s speech at the Akorda presidential residence... MORE

Following Russia’s peculiar behavior in regard to sharing information on Tamerlan Tsarnaev with the United States (https://polit.ru/news/2013/04/22/tamerlan/), Moscow decided to pursue the same policies toward Chechens living in Europe. The exact figure or number of Chechens residing in Europe is unknown. According to some unconfirmed... MORE

At the meeting of the Russian Ministry for Regional Development on February 4, Dagestan’s leader Ramazan Abdulatipov said the central government in Moscow should give the regions the right to administer regional resources if it cannot do it properly itself. Abdulatipov provided an example, noting... MORE

An article in a Russian online military journal reports that some Kazan Tatar nationalists and Islamists are calling for the launch of a Euromaidan-style protest movement inside the Russian Federation. The article is a transparent effort to discredit the Ukrainian version by linking it to... MORE

The events in neighboring Ukraine have spawned multiple publications in which Ukraine and Belarus are compared and contrasted and the potential effect of the Ukrainian events on Belarus is analyzed. “Yanukovych may not survive politically even until the 2015 elections,” writes Alexander Klaskovsky, one of... MORE

On February 7, as the Winter Olympics were opening in Sochi, police in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, violently dispersed a peaceful protest by Circassian activists. Thirty-seven protesters in the republic’s capital were arrested, their flags and banners, some reading “Sochi Is the Land of Genocide,” were confiscated.... MORE

The opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games (February 7) was just about picture-perfect, and the sizeable legion of critics, including most of the home-grown disbelievers in the ability of the ruling plutocracy to organize this mega-event, had to eat their words. It is... MORE

The crackdown on “human flesh searches” and including cybersecurity within the jurisdiction of the recently created National Security Committee, are the most recent episodes in a series that outlines the Communist Party’s concern and intent regarding social media. Xi Jinping’s administration is concerned that social... MORE

Since the start of the year, the conflicting sides in the North Caucasus and media monitoring organizations have begun providing figures for the number of people killed and wounded in fighting between government forces and militants in 2013.Losses in the conflict between the Caucasus Emirate... MORE

The 2014 Winter Olympics, which are estimated to have cost the Russian taxpayer some $50 billion, will be officially declared open this week (February 7) in Sochi by President Vladimir Putin. The games are intended to magnify before the world Putin’s personal achievements and triumphs... MORE