The Kremlin is moving from confusion to controversy in international affairs, a policy area which used to boost Russia’s “great power” status and bring joy to its leaders. Moscow cannot formulate a coherent position on the eruption of violence in the Gaza “black hole,” and... MORE

It will soon be a year since frictions emerged between the leaders of the neighboring and kindred republics, Chechnya and Ingushetia. Although the capitals of the two republics, Grozny and Magas, are no more than 100 kilometers apart, the two republican heads communicate through statements... MORE

The most pertinent message of the just-ended 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress has perhaps come from Premier Wen Jiabao. This is despite the fact outgoing General Secretary Hu Jintao’s 101-minute Political Report to the 18th Party Congress (hereafter Report) has dominated Chinese and international... MORE

On November 11, the municipal court in Tbilisi decided to suspend the former chief of the Joint Staff of the armed forces of Georgia, General Giorgi Kalandadze, from office, having thereby satisfied the general prosecutors’ request (https://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=25438). The general is charged with beatings of six... MORE

At the beginning of November, Chechen authorities made several statements that were underreported by the media but which illuminated important aspects of Moscow’s policies in the North Caucasus. Moreover, those statements allow an assessment of how much autonomy Moscow is willing to grant to Chechnya... MORE

The Ministry of Interior’s Berkut riot police has never intervened in Ukrainian elections to the same degree as during the October 28 parliamentary elections. Berkut assisted regional governors in securing victories for pro-regime candidates through electoral fraud by storming election precincts, taking away counted votes... MORE

On November 8, the International Crisis Group presented two reports—titled “The North Caucasus: The Challenges of Integration (I), Ethnicity and Conflict,” and “The North Caucasus: The Challenges of Integration (II), Islam, the Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency”—at the Sakharov Center in Moscow. Apart from the conflict in... MORE

Russian psychiatrists are pressing the Duma to return the Soviet-era law on psychiatric assistance that allowed doctors at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute and elsewhere to indefinitely detain and treat people whose only “symptoms” were opposition to Soviet leaders and their policies. For more than 40 years,... MORE

On November 7, the Circassian activist group Justice for the North Caucasus issued an emergency statement on the situation in Syria. The group called on the international community to send “relief to hundreds of men, women, children and elderly who have been under siege for... MORE

The Russian political class had hardly any time last week to contemplate the consequences of US President Barack Obama’s re-election for a second term or to follow the tense atmosphere at the 18th Communist Party Congress in Beijing—it was the cutthroat clash of Kremlin clans... MORE