Merhat Sharipzhan is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL who focuses on developments in the former Soviet Union.
The father of a Russian opposition activist who mysteriously fell ill in Moscow last week says he believes his son was poisoned.
A Russian nongovernmental organization says masked men have stormed its office in Chechnya's capital.
The assassination of Aleksei Mozgovoi, a separatist commander in eastern Ukraine and proponent of the idea of an independent Novorossia, has led to a lot of finger pointing.
Herds of one of Central Asia's most iconic animals, Kazakhstan's saiga antelope, are dwindling rapidly and no one seems to know why.
Just days after a crowd in Kharkiv pulled down a massive statue of Lenin, body parts from the statue are for sale in Ukraine. Who is selling them, and why?
Ukraine's pro-Russia separatists say they won't give up Donetsk, their largest stronghold, without a fight. Now they are digging in for battle.
For years the Ukrainian army has been underfunded and neglected. So much so, that volunteers are now raising money to get soldiers the most basic supplies.
Fighting is ramping up fast in eastern Ukraine and so far the Ukrainian Army has shown combat capabilities that vary from very bad to very good. Why the mixed performance?
Kazakh authorities want to brand two opposition groups and several media outlets as extremist and ban them.
This week, police in Kazakhstan's idyllic Ile-Alatau national park made a grisly discovery: the bodies of 11 people, including several forest rangers, all bearing multiple stab wounds and some burned beyond recognition. Officials have made no arrests and offered no motive for the bizarre killings, which have sparked comparisons to another unresolved crime -- the mass shooting in May of 14 border guards and another ranger on the remote Kazakh-Chinese border.
The mystery over why the brother of a prominent Uzbek opposition figure was not released from prison as scheduled has been solved -- he is serving an additional five-year term.
I was 41 in 2004, when I was first shown this black-and-white picture: four men posing on horseback, one with a baby boy in his arms. It was the first time I'd ever seen my grandfather, Parkizat Sharipzhan. He's the man in his early 30s on the far right, with a briefcase in his hands.
The recent shooting death of Kazakh boxer Yermek Serikov is the latest in an ugly series of sports-related crimes. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 20 prominent sportsmen in former Soviet republics have died under suspicious circumstances.
Tengiz Gudava, a former RFE/RL correspondent and a highly respected Central Asia and Caucasus analyst, died this week in Prague at the age of 55.
On March 30, 2007, Oralghaisha Omarshanova, a journalist with the Astana-based weekly newspaper "Zakon i pravosudie," disappeared shortly after publishing an article focusing on a violent clash two weeks earlier between Chechens and Kazakhs in two villages in southern Kazakhstan. Most media coverage of the incident focused primarily on the ethnic nature of the violence. Omarshanova was the first journalist to ask a different set of questions.
There are no signs of any easing in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, or Kazakhstan, notwithstanding all four countries' constitutional guarantees of rights and freedoms.
Three years ago, Kazakhs were shocked by the news that an opposition party leader had been found shot dead, execution-style, in an Almaty suburb. Altynbek Sarsenbaev had been considered the leading potential challenger to President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the former head of the Kazakh Communist Party who has served as president since 1991. But what happened next was even more shocking.
During the Soviet era, America and freedom were synonymous for many in the Soviet Union and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. That feeling increased even more after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Central Asians welcomed their independence as mainly the result of the successful standoff between the Free World led by the United States, and the Totalitarian World led by the Soviet Union. But the "pragmatism" of U.S. policy has left many hoping such idealism will return to how Washington approaches Central Asia.
The results of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, held in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, this week, were very different from what Russian President Dmitry Medvedev confidently predicted beforehand.
For the majority of those who call themselves former Soviet citizens, the death of the acclaimed but controversial Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Russia's armed conflict with Georgia have nothing in common. But for citizens of at least one former Soviet republic, these two tragic events are somehow related.
Load more
