By John C.K. Daly (7/9/2008 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Foreign investment in Mongolia is largely directed towards the country's vast, largely untapped mineral resources. Russia, Mongolia's second largest trading partner, has an inside advantage, as it provides approximately 90 percent of the country's oil imports and nearly all of its wheat imports. Moscow is now focusing on acquiring a dominant position in developing Mongolia's uranium resources, but Russia’s heavy-handed capitalist policies are provoking a political backlash.

By Sebastien Peyrouse (7/9/2008 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Turkmen capital Ashgabat, regarded as a new Dubai, has been being remodelled in line with the first president’s, Saparmurat Niyazov’s, taste for giant-scale projects. If there is one area in which Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s policies have not changed from his predecessor but have actually magnified them, it is precisely in the construction sector. The economic stakes of this boom are important, and have provoked a growing competitiveness between French company Bouygues and Turkish firms.

By Dmitry Shlapentokh (7/9/2008 issue of the CACI Analyst)

In spring 2008, an unprecedented event took place in Chechnya when a quarrel between President Ramzan Kadyrov and Sulim Yamadaev, the commander of the Vostok battalion, almost led to military action when Kadyrov’s paramilitary detachments surrounded the Vostok base. In the clashes, several people were killed, and several officers of the Russian forces were arrested. The event is Kafkaesque given that Kadyrov’s forces and the Vostok are both legitimate military detachments supposedly fully controlled by Moscow, the latter even an integral part of the Russian army.