Carnegie Moscow Center
The political fallout of the horrible murders in Gyumri will not result in a strategic re-orientation by Armenia away from Russia. However, it will undermine public support for Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and his government.
Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus, is now firmly entrenched in Russian politics at the federal-level, and it appears that he is there to stay, because Putin and Kadyrov really need each other.
Russia and South Ossetia are about to sign a “Treaty of Alliance and Integration.” However, normalization of relations with Georgia is impossible as long as Moscow continues to strengthen its grip on South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
2014 was a year of crisis. Ebola, ISIS, and Donbas are now part of the global lexicon. Eurasia Outlook experts weigh in on how crises on Russia’s periphery affected the country, and what these developments mean for Moscow in 2015.
In the new ideological cleavage that has opened up between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Western countries, one idea divides them like no other: the meaning of regime change.
The terrorist attack that shook Grozny during the night of December 4 has put in question the authorities’ ability to control the situation in the North Caucasus, even in the seemingly stable Chechen Republic.
One of the most important consequences of the dramatic violence in Grozny may be the impact it has on Russia-Western relations. Amidst a stand-off with the West over Ukraine, the Kremlin may interpret this terrorist acts as “Western attempts to fuel instability inside Russia.”
Calling time on the South Stream pipeline project, Putin announced a new Black Sea pipeline to Turkey instead. The new project could be a competitor to Azerbaijan gas ambitions, but, at the same time, it may require more collaboration in the future.
In view of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Turkey, Eurasia Outlook asked a few of the authors of the recent paper on Russian-Turkish cooperation what to expect from this visit.
With Russia—for better or worse. That is the message society in Abkhazia is receiving now that a new Abkhaz-Russian treaty has been drafted which could be signed as early as next week.