Liz Fuller writes the Caucasus Report blog for RFE/RL.
Reforms announced by Georgia's new interior minister leave some questioning whether they are enough to reverse the steady decline in public trust in the police.
The spring draft got under way in Georgia this week under new guidelines intended to ensure that the country's armed forces conform as closely as possible to NATO standards -- even though it has little chance of being invited to join the alliance in the foreseeable future.
Faced with the galloping jihadization in the region, Russian experts are ever more frequently calling for a new state policy for the North Caucasus. Such calls are misguided insofar there can be no one-size-fits-all set of measures, only individually tailored solutions for specific republics.
Since the start of the first post-Soviet Chechen war in the fall of 1994, rebel leader Doku Umarov has risen from a rank-and-file fighter to command a network of insurgent groups across the North Caucasus.
Five years ago, on March 8, 2005, the Russian authorities announced the death in a shootout of Chechen President and resistance commander Aslan Maskhadov.
With the increased attention that comes with becoming the first former Soviet republic to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, what does Kazakhstan hope to achieve?
A little less than three years ago, Serzh Sarkisian, then Armenian defense minister, nailed his foreign-policy colors to the mast by publishing a commentary calling for Turkey and Armenia to establish diplomatic and good-neighborly relations with no preconditions on either side. Now, thanks in large part to Sarkisian's personal commitment and with the support of the United States, the two countries are tantalizingly close to attaining that goal.
Officials from both the pro-independence Chechen government in exile and the Moscow-backed Chechen administration have announced plans to hold a World Congress of Chechens later this year. Will that gathering contribute to the hoped-for consolidation of the Chechen people? Or is it just intended primarily to enhance the image of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov?
Ramzan Kadyrov's career trajectory, from the poorly educated son of a Muslim cleric to one of the most powerful men in Russia, epitomizes Mao Tse-Tung's classic pronouncement that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." But Kadyrov's recent statements reflect a desire for a redefinition of the powers of federation subject heads that would strengthen his position even further.
Representatives of the Chechen government in exile and the pro-Moscow Chechen Republic have announced that they have started consultations aimed at promoting national reconciliation in Chechnya. Is this process likely to bring an end to the ongoing fighting across the North Caucasus?
The visit by the French, Russian, and U.S. co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group to Yerevan and Baku may have brought a formal settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict one step closer.
A resistance website reported the attack on Ingushetia President Yunusbek Yevkurov two hours after it occurred, but no one has claimed responsibility. However, its timing and the modus operandi suggest it was the work of the North Caucasus resistance.
The multiple attacks on the Interior Ministry headquarters and other police buildings in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, five years ago constituted a significant milestone in the evolution of the Chechen resistance into a pan-Caucasus Islamic movement uniting young Muslims alienated by official corruption and arbitrary police brutality.
The death three years ago today of Chechen Republic Ichkeria (ChRI) President and resistance commander Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev was a milestone in the evolution of what emerged in 1994 as an almost exclusively Chechen fight for independence into a pan-Caucasian, multinational Islamic resistance movement.
Nearly nine months after the war between Russia and Georgia last August, the situation surrounding the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remains tense. Some observers have warned that fighting in the region could flare up again within the next few months. But would a new war helpRussia achieve its objectives?
Does Baku intend to create a pretext for Azerbaijan to backtrack on all or some of the principles agreed on in Prague? That may only become clear when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian meet again next month in St. Petersburg.
A new and apparently unanticipated challenge has emerged to Azerbaijan's political status quo in the form of peaceful student protests. The catalyst was a bloodbath perpetrated by a young Azeri from Georgia whom the authorities have written off as an unhinged loner.
There would be a most pleasing symmetry in Prague serving as the venue for at least a preliminary agreement on resolving the Karabakh conflict, given that it was in Prague five years ago that the OSCE-mediated talks that yielded the Basic Principles got under way.
Despite its seemingly arbitrary decision to call an end to the Chechnya counterterrorism operation, the Kremlin could equally arbitrarily launch a new one, even if it's just to remind Ramzan Kadyrov which side his bread is buttered on.
Informed observers believe Moscow has finally realized that Ramzan Kadyrov constitutes both an embarrassment and a potential threat.
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