Georgian authorities have successfully restored legal order and are starting intensive development work in the hitherto isolated upper part of the Kodori Gorge. Tbilisi-based authorities of the pre-1992 Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia are now relocating to upper Kodori, the only part of Abkhazia not controlled... MORE

Georgia will hold elections for local governments in early December, Giorgi Arveladze, head of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration, announced on August 7. Arveladze mentioned two reasons for choosing that month: to allow incumbent governments time to complete projects and to allow the new governments to... MORE

Russian will not become an official language; Ukraine will not be federalized; the state will protect Crimea’s indigenous Muslim population -- Crimean Tatars -- but illegal land grabs made in their name will not be tolerated. These were the messages that Viktor Yanukovych brought to... MORE

During the past week several individuals were detained by Kyrgyz law-enforcement agencies for distributing religious-ideological leaflets. According to recent reports, the number of detained people linked to radical group Hizb-ut-Tahrir has intensified in Kyrgyzstan’s northern cities, including the capital Bishkek (24.kg, August 14). Small groups... MORE

On July 25 the Belarusian militia searched the apartment of the Second Secretary of the Latvian Embassy, Reimo Smits, ostensibly as part of a campaign to uncover the distribution of pornographic materials in the Savetski district of Minsk. The incident sparked a diplomatic scandal that... MORE

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, constrained in his relations with the West owing to pressures from Russia and China, wants to reshape the perception of Bishkek’s role in Central Asia. Eschewing the perception that his country is becoming the focal point for the conflicting interests of... MORE

Apart from preparing to build the Altai gas pipeline from Western Siberia, Russian authorities have also indicated plans to build a new gas pipeline from Sakhalin to neighboring China along a network of gas pipelines to supply domestic consumers in Russia's Far East. After meeting... MORE

The outstanding success of the British secret services in foiling a terrorist plot that could have claimed hundreds of lives did not fail to make headlines in the Russian media. Newspapers emphasized particularly the fact that all detained suspects were young Muslims of Pakistani origin... MORE

The Donetsk interest group is clearly the hegemonic factor in Ukraine’s newly installed coalition government under Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. It seems quite possible that Washington and Brussels can “do business” politically and perhaps to some extent even strategically with this group. Certainly, the government’s... MORE