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.
by Emil Souleimanov (05/01/2013 issue of the CACI Analyst)
During the Boston marathon on April 15, two bombs exploded leaving three dead and 264 injured. According to the FBI investigation, two brothers of Chechen/Dagestani origin, Tamerlan (26) and Jokhar Tsarnaev (19), permanently residing in the U.S., organized and carried out the bombings. Given the terrorists’ ethnic profile and supposedly religious motivation, questions arise as to whether the Tsarnaev brothers acted on their own or in cooperation with or on instructions of a Jihadist group either within or outside America, for instance, in their native North Caucasus.
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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