By Mamuka Tsereteli
March 10th, 2016, The CACI Analyst
On March 4, 2016, Georgia and Azerbaijan reached a deal that allows Georgia to receive close to 500 million cubic meters (mcm) of additional gas annually from Azerbaijan. Georgia’s Minister of Energy Kakha Kaladze announced after the signing that Georgia will no longer need to buy additional volumes of gas from Gazprom. This ends several months of speculation about Georgia’s concessions to Gazprom, fueled by a number of controversial statements by government officials. This agreement strengthens the strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Georgia, and keeps Georgia from becoming further affected by Gazprom’s coercive power.
By Emil Souleimanov
March 9th, 2016, The CACI Analyst
Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov has recently come under increasing fire for publicly humiliating his critics and – particularly when unable to reach out to his detractors in person – for retaliating against their families. In late 2015 and early 2016, members of the Europe-based Chechen diaspora communities organized a series of demonstrations attended by hundreds of Chechens protested in Vienna, Stockholm and Berlin against the indiscriminate practices carried out by the Kadyrov regime in their home country. These protests and Kadyrov’s consequent promise to hold protestors’ relatives living in Chechnya accountable for the supposedly anti-Chechen defamation campaign have drawn attention to the practice of collective punishment that has shaped Chechnya’s social and political landscape since the early 2000s.
By Boris Ajeganov
March 7th, 2016, The CACI Analyst
Uncertainty on the future of Georgia’s energy security has been growing since late 2015, when Georgia’s minister of energy and deputy PM Kakha Kaladze met with Alexey Miller, CEO of Russia’s Gazprom twice in the span of a month. Discussions on Gazprom’s potential return to the Georgian market quickly raised eyebrows in Baku and caused popular protests in Tbilisi. In a March 4 turnaround, Kaladze announced a deal to receive additional gas from Azerbaijan, thus removing the need to import Russian gas. Party politics aside, Tbilisi appears to have skillfully used its strategic position in the South Caucasus to secure a favorable energy deal without sacrificing its sovereignty.
By Avinoam Idan
February 29th, 2016, The CACI Analyst
The importance of Turkey’s downing of a Russian aircraft and the current Russian-Turkish confrontation is not only connected to the crisis in Syria; it could become a trigger for escalation between Russia and NATO. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union and NATO’s expansion eastward toward the Russian border, Russia has seen NATO as a major security threat to itself and its geostrategic space. Turkey is an important member of NATO, and 2016 is an election year in Washington. This serves as a window of opportunity for President Putin, who can take advantage of tensions with Turkey to undermine NATO’s standing.
The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst is a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Council, Washington DC., and the Institute for Security and Development Policy, Stockholm. For 15 years, the Analyst has brought cutting edge analysis of the region geared toward a practitioner audience.
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