In recent months, Kazakhstan and Georgia have joined with Azerbaijan and Turkey to make considerable progress in their Silk Wind Project, which aims to construct a high-speed, multimodal container transportation system for freight shipments between the countries of Europe, the Caucasus and Asia. According to... MORE

On November 16, Russia’s Federal Security Service announced it had intercepted a channel that supplied gold from Russia’s north to Ingushetia. The security services confiscated over 17 kilograms of gold from an unnamed individual in the city of Kazan, Tatarstan. The same individual, a resident... MORE

Political instability in post-election Ukraine may soon be be compounded by economic and financial instability that has the potential for social unrest. The World Bank calculates that Ukraine has the second lowest per-capita income in Europe followed by Moldova. Ukraine, which was the second largest... MORE

In late June 2012, when Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially declared Tashkent’s decision to suspend its membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the country’s National Communications Inspectorate published a report concerning the activities of a Russian-owned company, O’zdunorbita. Established in 1991, this mobile... MORE

Under the presidency of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Belarus’s relationship with Russia has always been one of amity combined with duplicity. In theory, Minsk’s position is that of the weaker partner, dealing with a country that can be quite ruthless in terms of using its economic clout... MORE

On November 10, Japan announced it would provide $700 million to the resource-rich Central Asian countries for exploitation of oil, gas and rare earths minerals (REM). The announcement was made at the fourth meeting of foreign ministers representing member-states of the “Central-Asia plus Japan” Dialogue... MORE

Ankara wants to create a transportation corridor across Georgia to North Ossetia in order to establish links with regions of the Russian Federation and the states of Central Asia, Bulent Ecevit Ugur, an official of the Turkish Economics Ministry, told a meeting of the Russian-Turkish... MORE

Adding to a recent series of worrying Russian actions that have exposed serious faults in the Transnistrian conflict resolution process (see EDM, October 25), Moscow has now declared its intention to build a “Eurasian economic region” in Transnistria (Ng.ru, November 2). This project is meant... MORE

In early September, the United Nations once again warned of the growing risks of another global food crisis, following particularly bad harvests in the United States, Russia, Ukraine and other grain-producing countries. These negative developments have already led to a rapid erosion of grain reserves... MORE

One of the closest associates of Georgia’s Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, State Minister for Reintegration Paata Zakareishvili, has unveiled the government’s idea to unblock the railway link that connected Russia with the South Caucasus republics in Soviet times.In an interview with the Moscow paper Kommersant... MORE