Carnegie Moscow Center
The Black Sea region could do with some Turkish soft power, but it looks as though this is not a priority for Prime Minister Erdogan.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan has said that he supports the Crimean referendum, but it is hard to say whether Armenia’s authorities could have expressed another view.
As soon as the Crimea crisis struck, both Armenia and Azerbaijan immediately hardened their positions on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict.
Some kind of political crisis in Crimea looks almost inevitable. At the moment the priority has to be stop having a military one as well.
With signs of a stabler political climate and growing investments in Georgia facilitated by two big funds, it’s not out of the question that 2014 could see the return of the “Caucasian tiger.”
Although Russia has failed to get at the Winter Olympics the one prize it particularly coveted, the ice hockey title, it managed to win a far more important victory—in ensuring that the Games, the athletes, and spectators were safe. However, making Russia safer remains a challenge.
Abkhazia has a right to feel disappointed. The Olympic Games are happening just a few miles to the north and yet the republic has little to do with it.
Though Sochi is located in the Caucasus, the planners of the Sochi Olympics failed to give the games any Caucasian flavor. It looks as though the North Caucasians have been factored into the planning of the games only in so far as they present a security headache.
The terrorist threat to the Sochi Olympics may come from individuals who do not belong to organized and at least somewhat known terrorist groups.
The Sochi Olympics could become the pretext for a real rapprochement between Moscow and Tbilisi. However, conversation between Russia and Georgia about the insurgency in the North Caucasus never started, and in the future this will be remembered as a missed opportunity.