Liz Fuller writes the Caucasus Report blog for RFE/RL.
The death of Aslan Maskhadov, the former Soviet army colonel, resistance leader, and Chechen president, has accelerated the expansion of the conflict against Moscow into other regions of the North Caucasus.
Chechnya's new parliament is scheduled to vote on on the nomination of First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov as prime minister. The vote is likely to be little more than a formality.
Arkady Ghukasian, president of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, says Baku's refusal to hold direct talks with members of the Karabakh leadership is slowing mediation efforts.
In recent years ever-larger numbers of young men from ethnic groups and regions of the North Caucasus have joined the ranks of the Chechen resistance.
Georgia's parliament will almost certainly vote to demand the swift withdrawal of the Russian peacekeeping force in South Ossetia. But Georgia's government does not have to act on that demand, and some ask whether it is able to do so.
Chechen resistance leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev issued a decree on 5 February stripping Deputy Prime Minister Akhmed Zakayev and Health Minister Umar Khanbiyev, both of whom currently represent the resistance in Europe, of those government posts, and ordering most Chechen ministers currently abroad (except Zakayev) to return to Chechnya. (<a href="http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/02/6fcee1b2-edeb-4017-be15-fcf5448f83b8.html">RFE/RL spoke to Zakayev</a> on 6 February about the recent reshuffle.)
Most Russian media coverage of Daghestan over the past year has focused on the activities of groups of militants who have systematically gunned down dozens of police officers and other officials.
Disagreements over whether or not to participate in the 13 May repeat parliamentary elections in certain districts now seem increasingly likely to lead to the collapse of the main opposition election bloc.
Azerbaijan has yet to unveil a new national-security concept, which was to precede the formulation and implementation of a new military doctrine, despite President Ilham Aliyev's orders in early 2005 to begin work on it.
It remains unclear whether the Azerbaijani and Armenian presidents will succeed in reaching a compromise on the contested points concerning the longstanding conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh during their upcoming summit near Paris, which a spokesman has said will take place on 10 February.
(RFE/RL) There are still 16 months to go before the Armenian parliamentary elections due in May 2007. But already signs are surfacing of tensions within the current three-party coalition government and within the opposition Artarutiun (Justice) bloc that constitutes the larger of two opposition parliament factions. And new parties and alliances are likely to emerge in the run-up to the ballot.
Prague, 16 January 2006 (RFE/RL) -- The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan are scheduled to meet in London tomorrow with the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group to prepare the groundwork for a meeting early next month of the two countries' presidents.
(RFE/RL) Two months after the 6 November parliamentary elections in which, according to official returns, Azerbaijan's opposition won a mere 10 of the 125 mandates, the cohesion of the opposition Azadliq election alliance is threatened by disagreements over future strategy, while two major opposition parties are riven by internal dissent. Whether those disagreements will result in total fragmentation, or whether former rivals might join forces in a new opposition alliance, is as yet unclear.
(RFE/RL) After young militants launched multiple attacks on police and security agency targets in Nalchik in October, Kabardino-Balkaria Republic President Arsen Kanokov has made efforts to reach out to the younger generation.
Ramzan Kadyrov at his father's funeral in 2004 (AFP) On 27 November, elections will take place in Chechnya for a new bicameral parliament. The ballot is intended as the final stage in the ongoing process of "normalization" in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement that the war against the Chechen resistance is over. That "normalization" process began with the adoption of a new constitution in March 2003, followed by the election in August of that year of former mufti Akhmad-hadji Kadyrov as republican head. Kadyrov's death in a bomb attack on 9 May 2004 further delayed the parliamentary elections, the date of which had been pushed back from the fall of 2003 to March 2004 to March 2005.
Armenia's estimated 2.4 million registered voters will be called upon to vote on 27 November in a referendum on a package of draft constitutional amendments, which the United States, European Union, and Council of Europe have described as "vital" for the ongoing reform process.
Salome Zurabichvili (file photo) (RFE/RL) Prague, 15 November 2005 -- Some 300 people assembled on Tbilisi's main boulevard on 13 November to protest Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili's recent affirmation that police should not hesitate to open fire on armed criminals, Caucasus Press reported.
There is still no sign of Ruslan Nakhushev, a former KBG officer and head of the unregistered Islamic Research Institute in Nalchik, who went missing on 4 November.
(AFP) Among the improvements registered in the 2005 Azerbaijani parliamentary campaign in comparison to previous elections over the past decade, the International Election Observation Mission noted in its preliminary assessment the allocation to opposition candidates of more free airtime on state-controlled media.
(RFE/RL) The Russian authorities will formally reject any request by the leaders of the State Register Don Cossacks to recreate the Don Cossack Oblast that existed a century ago by merging the present-day Rostov and Volgograd oblasts, "Nezavisimaya gazeta" reported on 3 November.
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