The vote over the name change from South Ossetia to Alania reveals how the autonomist aspirations of the Ossetians (however legitimate) have been exploited in the Great Game. (Map: Wikipedia)
Armenian security forces stormed a police station that had been seized by opposition militants in the capital Yerevan, amid growing protests over losses in Nagorno-Karabakh. (Map: Wikipedia)
As the worst fighting since a 1994 truce breaks out in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey’s President Erdogan asserts himself as protector of Azerbaijan, pledging to back Baku “to the end.” (Map: Wikipedia)
“Omar the Chechen,” a top-ranking ISIS commander apparently killed in a US air-strike in Syria, is said to have been trained by the Pentagon when he fought the Russians in Georgia. (Photo via Levant Report)
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee announced that security forces killed three militants who had sworn allegiance to ISIS in a shoot-out in Dagestan. (Map via La Croix International)
The government of Georgia accuses Russian military forces of encroaching on its territory in the contested South Ossetia enclave, seizing a section of BP’s Baku-Supsa pipeline. (Map: Perry-Castañeda Library)
The Russian policy establishment is hypothesizing an ISIS hand in the bloody attack by Chechen insurgents in Grozny—and implying that the West is in turn behind ISIS. (Map via La Croix International)
With the Winter Olympics underway in Sochi, Russian special forces troops have killed several suspected militants in a series of raids in Dagestan, just across the Caucasus. (Map: Wikitravel)
Circassians are calling for a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics, demanding that Russia's 19th-century military campaign against their people be recognized as a genocide.
The European Court for Human Rights ruled that Russia must pay $2.6 million, to the families of 36 Chechen men who disappeared between 2000 and 2006.
In the wake of the Volgograd terror blasts, Putin is preparing a new offensive against Chechen insurgents seeking to rebuild the 19th century "Caucasus Emirate."
Voices on the left seek to play down jihadist involvement in the Chechen struggle, while the neocon right plays it up—ironically in line with Moscow's propaganda.
