By Bakhtiyar Aslanov (the 30/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Since the 1994 cease-fire agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, negotiations between the parties have been overseen by the OSCE Minsk Group without any particular success towards peaceful solution. After the deadlock in peace negotiations over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2011, Azerbaijan and Armenia both accelerated their stockpiling of arms and intensified their public rhetoric of preparing for a new war.

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By Valeriy Dzutsev (the 16/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The exclusion of North Caucasians from the pool of conscripts to the Russian military signifies steady a plummeting of the single national identity in the Russian Federation. As the insurgency warfare drags on in the North Caucasus, the Russian military is increasingly unwilling to draft ethnic non-Russians from the North Caucasus. Apart from security concerns, the government is wary of constant clashes between the North Caucasians and ethnic Russians in the army. The separation of the North Caucasians from the civil duty, mandated by the state, further increases the divide between ethnic Russians and North Caucasians.

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Stephen Blank (the 02/10/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Five years after its war with Georgia, Russia is now moving to institutionalize its gains into enduring territorial-political structures. During September 2013, Moscow effectively blackmailed Armenia into joining the Eurasian Union and has now announced that it is going to sign a treaty with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, recognizing the “international borders” between them and Russia. As a result, Russian soldiers are now erecting fences effectively demarcating these territories from Georgia, if not formally annexing them to Russia. Both of these moves undermine the sovereignty, and in Georgia’s case the integrity, of these two South Caucasian states and demonstrate that Russia’s neo-imperial effort to create a closed bloc in the CIS is intensifying and accelerating.