Taklama

In my post on the Prigorodny District I mentioned the fact that part of the District had been transferred from Ingushetia to North Ossetia following Stalin's 1944 expulsion of the 'guilty' Ingush people to Central Asia. I've found a very useful map of the North Caucasus on Wikipedia (uploaded by …

The Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets claims that after the August 2008 War, Russia was originally planning for Abkhazia and South Ossetia to form a confederation, and to recognise them as one state. The crux of the plan though was that the confederation would have been open for new members, specifically …

Window on Eurasia draws attention to a story which RFE/RL seems not to have covered: on 17 December Taymuraz Mamsurov, President of North Ossetia-Alania, and Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, President of Ingushetia, signed an agreement over the Prigorodny District.

The conflict over the Prigorodny District is one of the many conflicts …

This post is a quick update to the story of the destruction of the World War II monument in Kutaisi last Saturday, which killed a mother and her child.

The governor of the Imereti region has been fired, and the head of the company directly responsible for the detonation has …

The politics of Abkhazia revolve around individual politicians and temporary alliances, and less around political parties and ideological current. The run-up to the recent Presidential election in Abkhazia added another chapter to the already very interesting post-Soviet political career of Sergei Shamba.

Sergei Shamba first became Foreign Minister in May …

Authorities in Kutaisi have pulled down a World War II monument, making headlines because it cost two people's lives and it injured several others. Which is a tragedy, and I wonder why they had to pull down the monument in the first place. Supposedly it stood on the site where …

This weblog was started on Saturday 19 December 2009.