On August 10 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev held a meeting in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi with the leaders of political parties represented in the Russian legislature, the State Duma, to discuss important issues including the current political, economic and social development in... MORE

Reports indicate that Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (Parti Karkerani Kurdistan - PKK), will release a “roadmap” for resolving Turkey’s decades-old Kurdish insurgency on August 15 (see Terrorism Monitor, August 6). Branches of the PKK continue to operate in northern... MORE

On August 10, Kyrgyz authorities detained Dilmurat Akbarov, the leader of the Ittipak Uyghur society, and his deputy Jamaldin Nasyrov. These leaders had organized demonstrations calling for an independent investigation into last month's riots in Xinjiang. They featured images and posters accusing Beijing of implementing... MORE

Less than one month after the notorious murder of the Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, Zarema Sadullaeva and her husband Alik Dzhabrailov were kidnapped and found dead the next day in Grozny. When they initially disappeared on August 10, the Chechen police attempted to... MORE

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has publicly attacked his Ukrainian counterpart Victor Yushchenko and called his administration's policies deliberately anti-Russian. In an open letter and in a video posting on his official Kremlin blog, Medvedev accused Ukraine of supporting "barbaric attacks" by the pro-Western regime of... MORE

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill visited Ukraine from July 27 - August 5 in order to suppress the pro-independence mood among the local clergy and more broadly, to assert Russian religious and cultural domination. Kirill made it clear that he would oppose plans, backed by Ukrainian... MORE

On August 10 the family of the celebrated murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who covered human rights abuses in Chechnya, issued a statement condemning a Moscow court's decision to refuse to reopen the investigation and to merge it with the main case, (designed to find... MORE

The Russian government began insisting in late July that gas from the Sakhalin-1 project must not be sold to China by its partners, including ExxonMobil, but instead diverted to meet the growing demand in Russia's Far East provinces. Many observers were shocked by what they... MORE

The Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) released its June figures on the industrial production index, which gave mixed signals concerning the influence of the economic crisis on the Turkish economy (www.turkstat.gov.tr, Press Release, August 10). The figures show that although industrial output is still down from... MORE

On August 3, the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill during his visit to Sevastopol stressed the importance of the work of orthodox clergymen in the Russian army. Kirill stated that the modern soldier must be "strong in spirit" and emphasized the importance... MORE