On December 11, the newly elected parliament of Georgia gathered for its opening session. Of the legislative body’s 150 deputies, only 88 attended the event. All represented billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party (Civil.ge, Kommersant December 11, 2020). Georgian Dream has governed the... MORE

The year 2020 was marked by a range of both long-continuing and entirely novel trends in the Northeast Caucasus. Insurgency violence simmered in the region albeit at a lower scale than in previous years. But at the same time, both international and domestic Russian scandals... MORE

Russia’s post-Soviet counter-transition arrived at its logical conclusion in 2020: Starting from a fledgling democracy in the 1990s, the country shifted to an “enlightened authoritarianism” in the 2000s, evolving into a barely disguised autocracy during the 2010s, now having finally settled into a quasi-dictatorship. That... MORE

The drastically upended situation along the southern edge of the South Caucasus has affected Iran in several complex ways. Among the three large powers surrounding the region—Iran, Russia and Turkey—only Iran borders on the formerly Armenian-occupied Azerbaijani territories of Zangilan, Jabrayil and Fuzuli, which adjoin... MORE

In the wake of Azerbaijan’s successful offensive against the dug-in Armenian forces in Karabakh and surrounding Azerbaijani districts, the defense ministers of Turkey and Russia, General (ret.) Hulusi Akar and General Sergei Shoigu, respectively, met on November 11 and penned a memorandum of understanding to... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. *To read Part Two, please click here. Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently supplanted the Minsk Group’s triple co-chairmanship (the United States, France, Russia) as mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It was Putin, not the Minsk co-chairmanship, who... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here. Azerbaijan’s successful military action against Armenia’s occupying forces in Karabakh this autumn disproved Western diplomacy’s admonitions about post-Soviet “frozen conflicts” having “no military solutions” but “only political, negotiated solutions” with “no alternatives.” Armenia, however, had imposed its own... MORE

In the wake of the December 14 vote by the Electoral College, which officially confirmed the election of Joseph Biden as the next President of the United States and Kamala Harris as Vice President, Russian President Vladimir Putin finally, and reluctantly, congratulated the US President-elect.... MORE

Popular narrative tropes are not always accurate predictors of how a story will ultimately develop. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the former presidential hopeful and a person believed by many to have won the presidential elections of August 9, is widely seen as a positive character in the... MORE

The Azerbaijani military’s use of Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), purchased from Turkey, played such a prominent role in Baku’s victory over Armenian forces during the Second Karabakh War (September 27–November 9, 2020) that defense analysts around the world are now focusing on how... MORE