Nov 22

BBC -

Azeri President Ilham Aliyev has warned he is ready to use force to wrest control of a disputed enclave from Armenia if last-ditch peace talks fail.

He said talks starting on Sunday in Munich were the final hope of settling the Nagorno Karabakh issue peacefully.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place in the region since it was the scene of a brutal war between the two countries in the 1990s.

Both nations lay claim to the enclave, currently under Armenian control.

In comments broadcast on Azeri TV on Saturday, President Aliyev said that if the Munich talks failed to reach agreement he would be "left with no other option".

"We have the full right to liberate our land by military means," he said.

Luke Harding | Yalta | Oct 11

The Observer - As Ukraine prepares for its first presidential election since the Orange Revolution, there are signs that its giant neighbour to the east will not tolerate a pro-western outcome.

From the terrace there are views of the Crimean peninsula, with fir trees, dark green cypresses and a shimmering bay. Inside – through a pleasant Italian courtyard – is the room where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt sat together around a wooden table and divided up postwar Europe.

But almost 65 years after the "big three" met in the Crimean seaside resort of Yalta – now in Ukraine – the question of zones of influence has come back to haunt Europe. Russia has made it clear that it sees Ukraine as crucial to its bold claim that it is entitled to a zone of influence in its post-Soviet backyard.

Last month, a group of east European leaders and intellectuals gathered in the Livadia Palace, where Britain, the US and the Soviet Union held the Yalta conference in February 1945. The idea was to discuss Ukraine's strategic future. But the discussion was overshadowed by one question: will there be a war between Russia and Ukraine?

The scenario is not as daft as it seems. In August, Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, gave his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yushchenko, an unprecedented diplomatic mugging. In a seething letter, and subsequent video message, Medvedev reprimanded Yushchenko for his "anti-Russian" stance. He told him that, as far as Russia was concerned, the pro-western Yushchenko was now a non-person.

Mary Beth Sheridan | Zurich | October 10

WaPo - Senior Armenian and Turkish officials traveled to Switzerland on Saturday to sign an agreement that could set them on a course to end a century of hostility stemming from brutal massacres at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

But just as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade arrived at the University of Zurich for the signing of the accord, she got word of a last-minute glitch. The motorcade reversed and sped to a hotel, where U.S. diplomats tried to satisfy concerns on the Armenian side over language in the two countries' statements.

Robert Fisk | Oct 8

The Independent - A new trade deal is set to gloss over the murder of 1.5 million people

In the autumn of 1915, an Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who was helping build the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he thought was a large Turkish army heading for Mesopotamia. But as the crowd came closer, he realised it was a huge caravan of women, moving forward under the supervision of soldiers.

The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men – most of whom had already had their throats cut by Turkish gendarmerie – and deported on a genocidal death march during which up to 1.5 million Armenians died.

Subjected to constant rape and beatings, some had already swallowed poison on their way from their homes in Erzerum, Serena, Sivas, Bitlis and other cities in Turkish western Armenia. "Some of them," Bishop Grigoris Balakian, one of Litzmayer's contemporaries, recorded, "had been driven to such a state that they were mere skeletons enveloped in rags, with skin that had turned leathery, burned from the sun, cold, and wind. Many pregnant women, having become numb, had left their newborns on the side of the road as a protest against mankind and God." Every year, new evidence emerges about this mass ethnic cleansing, the first holocaust of the last century; and every year, Turkey denies that it ever committed genocide. Yet on Saturday – to the horror of millions of descendants of Armenian survivors – the President of Armenia, Serg Sarkissian, plans to agree to a protocol with Turkey to re-open diplomatic relations, which should allow for new trade concessions and oil interests. And he proposes to do this without honouring his most important promise to Armenians abroad – to demand that Turkey admit it carried out the Armenian genocide in 1915.

Philip P. Pan | Oct 6

WaPo -

On maps, Crimea is Ukrainian territory, and this naval citadel on its southern coast is a Ukrainian city. But when court bailiffs tried to serve papers at a lighthouse here in August, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by armed troops from Russia's Black Sea Fleet who delivered them to police as if they were trespassing teenagers.

The humiliating episode underscored Russia's continuing influence in the storied peninsula on the Black Sea nearly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union -- and the potential for trouble here ahead of Ukraine's first presidential vote since the 2005 Orange Revolution.

Huge crowds of protesters defied Moscow in that peaceful uprising and swept a pro-Western government into power. Now, the Kremlin is working to undo that defeat, ratcheting up pressure on this former Soviet republic to elect a leader more amenable to Russia's interests in January.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a letter in August demanding policy reversals from a new Ukrainian government, including an end to its bid to join NATO. He also introduced a bill authorizing the use of troops to protect Russian citizens and Russian speakers abroad, a measure that some interpreted as targeting Crimea.

A group of prominent Ukrainians, including the country's first president, responded with a letter urging President Obama to prevent a "possible military intervention" by Russia that would "bring back the division of Europe." Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and other world powers, they noted.

If a crisis is ahead, it is likely to involve Crimea, a peninsula of rolling steppe and sandy beaches about the size of Maryland. The region was once part of Russia, and it is the only place in Ukraine where ethnic Russians are the majority. In the mid-1990s, it elected a secessionist leader who nearly sparked a civil war.

Crimea is also home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Sevastopol under a deal with Ukraine that expires in 2017. Russia wants to extend the lease, but Ukraine's current government insists it must go.

"It would be easy for Russia to inspire a crisis or conflict in Crimea if it continues to lose influence in Ukraine," said Grigory Perepelitsa, director of the Foreign Policy Institute in the Ukrainian Diplomatic Academy. "That's the message they're sending to any future president."

Dom Rotheroe | Oct 3

BBC - Political violence and killings seem to be daily occurrences in the tiny mainly Muslim republic of Ingushetia in the Russian North Caucasus, which shares a border with Chechnya. Dom Rotheroe explains why.

"Don't mention to our mother that he was tortured before he died," one of the sisters of the late Batyr Albakov whispers to us before we interview his family.

"She doesn't know about that and she has a weak heart."

They came in the early hours of 10 July to take Mamma Albakov's son away. Two carloads of security forces had barged their way into the family flat in Russia's Caucasian republic of Ingushetia.

Eleven days later, Batyr's family learned of his death through a report on the internet.

In that time, the 26-year-old aeroplane engineer had supposedly become an Islamic militant, acquired a gun and camouflage gear and been killed in a shoot-out with security forces.

Ian Traynor | Oct 1

The Guardian - An investigation into last year's Russia-Georgia war delivered a damning indictment of President Mikheil Saakashvili today, accusing Tbilisi of launching an indiscriminate artillery barrage on the city of Tskhinvali that started the war.

In more than 1,000 pages of analysis, documentation and witness statements, the most exhaustive inquiry into the five-day conflict dismissed Georgian claims that the artillery attack was in response to a Russian invasion, accused both sides of violations of the laws of war, indicated that war crimes had been perpetrated against Georgian civilians and rejected Russian claims of "genocide" in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia.

The EU-commissioned report, by a fact-finding mission of more than 20 political, military, human rights and international law experts led by the Swiss diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini, was unveiled in Brussels today after nine months of work.

"There is no way to assign overall responsibility for the conflict to one side alone," the report found.

But the conclusions will discomfit the western-backed Georgian leader, Saakashvili, who was found to have started the war with the attack on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on the night of 7 August last year, through a "penchant for acting in the heat of the moment".

The war started "with a massive Georgian artillery attack", the report said, citing an order from Saakashvili that the offensive was aimed at halting Russian military units moving into South Ossetia.

Flatly dismissing Saakashvili's version, the report said: "There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation ... Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated ... It could also not be verified that Russia was on the verge of such a major attack."

Clancy Chassay | Sept 20

The Observer - Policemen and soldiers work at the site of an explosion in a police station, Nazran, in Russia's Ingushetia region, Aug 17, 2009. Photograph: Stringer/Russia/Reuters

Like many in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia, Petimat Albakavar lives in terror. "Nobody sleeps properly. We can't because we are listening to every sound, waiting for the police to knock at the door," she says.

On 10 July, Petimat's 26-year-old son, Batyr, was taken away at dawn by armed men claiming to be Ingush police. They appeared at the door and demanded to see the family's passports but refused to show any identification themselves. "As soon as they left I went to all the police stations, but I couldn't find my son. I filed complaints with the police and government officials, but nobody knew anything," says Petimat, her eyes weary with grief and fear.

"Ten days later we found a report on the internet that someone with my son's name, whom they described as a rebel leader, had been killed in the forest. It was Batyr. His passport was with him."

According to human rights investigators, hundreds of civilians such as Batyr have been "disappeared", tortured and murdered by Russian security services as they struggle to quell a rebellion that spans across Ingushetia and the neighbouring republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. In June the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was critically injured by a car bomb in an apparent assassination attempt. As suicide bombers strike with alarming frequency, the security forces are unleashing a wave of terror which critics say is only serving to fuel the rebellion.

Moscow | Sept 16

AFP - Russia tightened its ties with Georgia's rebel regions on Tuesday by signing agreements allowing it to maintain military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia for nearly half a century.

Georgia's pro-Western government immediately condemned the move, with a top official saying the agreements would deepen a "barbaric" occupation.

Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov signed the long-awaited pacts with his Abkhazian and South Ossetian counterparts Merab Kishmaria and Yury Tanayev, the Interfax and ITAR-TASS news agencies reported.

"The agreements that have been signed are aimed at protecting the republics and people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia," Serdyukov was quoted as saying by the news agencies.

Serdyukov said he expected other agreements with Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be signed soon, including one on "military-technical cooperation," a term that Russian officials use to describe arms sales.

September 1

Al Jazeera - Turkey and Armenia are at the beginning of a "long process" of normalising ties, the Turkish foreign minister has said.

Ahmet Davutoglu's comments on Tuesday came a day after the feuding neighbours agreed to establish relations and reopen their border under a plan to end nearly a century of hostility.

Davutoglu told Turkey's NTV television that the process would be long but that obstacles could be overcome and that the border could be open by the end of the year.

"If everything goes as planned, if mutual steps are taken, the borders could be opened around New Year," he said.

Moscow | Aug 21

CNN - At least two police officers in Russia's restive region of Chechnya were killed Friday when two bombs went off in the capital, Grozny, the Russian Interior Ministry said.

The bombs went off around 2 p.m. (6 a.m. ET), the ministry said. An investigation into the explosions has been launched.

Reports on Russian state television said preliminary information suggested four people were killed in the blasts and one person was wounded.

** Suicide bombers on bicycles kill at least 4 police in Chechnya
** Russia rebels claim "economic war"
** Chechen Group Claims It Attacked Dam

Fred Weir | Aug 17

CSM - A week of regional violence climaxed Monday in Ingushetia when a suicide bomber blew a hole in a heavily fortified police headquarters, killing at least 20.

A week of extremist attacks on Russia’s seething southern flank climaxed Monday with a suicide truck bombing in Ingushetia that killed at least 20 and injured scores outside a police station in the tiny republic’s main city, Nazran.

The resulting explosion triggered a “raging fire” that destroyed a weapons room, incinerated nearby cars, and damaged nearby apartment buildings, according to an Associated Press (AP) report from Nazran. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the region in years, the AP said.

Violence by Islamist insurgents, once confined mainly to separatist Chechnya, has gradually spread throughout much of Russia’s northern Caucasus, leaving Russian authorities increasingly unable to guarantee order, or even protect pro-Moscow officials, in the mainly Muslim region.

For Moscow, the stakes are huge. The northern Caucasus region is Russia’s gateway to the energy-rich and strategically vital southern Caucasus, which includes the former Soviet nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

** Ingush leader accuses West of seeking to destabilize Caucasus

Philip P. Pan | Moscow | Aug 13

WaPo -

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin traveled to the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia on Wednesday and pledged to strengthen Russia's military presence there, defying U.S. and European objections amid simmering tensions in the region.

Speaking on the anniversary of his nation's victory over Georgia in a five-day war last year, Putin said the Kremlin planned to spend nearly $500 million to build a base in the separatist enclave and reinforce its de facto border with Georgia.

"It won't be a Maginot line," Putin said, referring to the fortifications France built against Germany before World War II.

Fred Weir | Moscow | Aug 7

CSM - It is responsible for economically troubled South Ossetia and may have spurred the European Union to seek alternative sources of energy.

Though the dispute over who started the war between Russia and Georgia has yet to abate, most experts agree that it erupted during the night of Aug. 7 with an apparently well-planned and massive Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, which had won its de facto independence from Georgia in a brutal civil war nearly two decades earlier.

About a dozen Russian peacekeeping troops died in that assault, prompting Moscow to send its North Ossetia-based 58th Army swarming through the Roki Tunnel the next day. Russian forces rapidly routed the Georgians and went on to briefly occupy a handful of Georgian towns such as Gori, where they destroyed Georgian weapons.

Many experts argue that Georgian President Saakashvili merely handed Russia the pretext it had long awaited. But while Russia may have won the war, in doing so it exposed potentially fatal weaknesses in its unreformed Soviet-era military machine. It also took on two expensive new dependencies – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – whose nominal independence no country in the world, other than Nicaragua, has joined Moscow in recognizing.

Lena Iremashvili | Tbilisi | July 27

IWPR - Promise of reform from Saakashvili puts ball in protesters’ court.

Georgia’s opposition has rejected proposals by President Mikheil Saakashvili intended to end a months-long demonstration by activists that has paralysed the capital, and promised a new wave of protest.

Opposition protesters occupied the central Rustaveli Avenue, which runs past parliament in central Tbilisi, for four months. They opened the road last week, but it remains lined with barred tents intended to symbolise the prison that they say the country has become under Saakashvili.

Saakashvili, whose resignation they have been demanding, made a long-promised speech on July 20, hoping to entice the activists’ leader into negotiations.

Agencies | July 19

Deutsche Welle - Memorial said it had decided to suspend its operations in Chechnya because its work there was "life-threatening."

Alexander Cherkasov, a Memorial board member, told Russian radio station Echo Moskvy that the group could not risk it any further.

"This murder has shown that working in Chechnya is fatally dangerous and we cannot risk the lives of our colleagues, even if they are ready to carry on their work," Cherkasov said.

Louis Imbert | Baku | July 11

The Independent - Wrapped in a white bathrobe, Arkady Shabunin stares out the window of the Naftalan clinic at the carcass of a yellow Lada balanced on four piles of bricks. It is an unlikely place for a spa retreat but the captain of a Siberian rafting team has travelled 1,800 miles to the Azeri capital of Baku for 10 days of massages and baths – using not mud, nor seaweed, but crude oil.

The attendant beckons. Mr Shabunin strips and enters a ceramic-tiled room. He grabs hold of the ornate bath handle and lowers his body into 35 gallons of black gold – as much as a barrel. Orangey filaments swirl about on the surface, sticking to the enamel and to the hair on his skin. The smell from the 40°C bath makes our heads spin.

If you strain your eyes, you can just about make out the tankers plying the Caspian Sea, transporting the light crude that Azerbaijan exports to the world. But the oil used here gushes out of the Earth at Naftalan, a small town 160 miles north-west of the capital.

"Naftalan is too heavy for the industry," Dr Alif Zulfugar, the manager of this unlikely spa, explains. "It is used only for healing purposes. It doesn't get treated in any way. It passes directly from the source to our tankers and then into our basins." Clients flock to the clinic from all over the former Soviet states, and increasingly from the Emirates and even Europe.

Marco Polo mentioned the virtues of Azeri oil in the 13th century. In The Travels, he wrote of a "fountain from which oil springs in great abundance ... not edible but good for burning and to treat men and animals with mange, and camels with hives and ulcers".

Brussels | June 19

UPI - Confidential documents written by the EU team investigating last year's Russian-Georgian war assign much of the blame to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.

A majority of EU experts say the Georgian president, and not the Kremlin, ordered the first military strike against two breakaway provinces, according to the documents obtained by German news magazine Der Spiegel. The Georgian offensive into South Ossetia and Abkhazia escalated into a five-day war with Russia that the powerful neighbor won.

That doesn't mean the Kremlin is entirely innocent. A senior member of the EU experts' commission tasked with probing the conflict, Otto Luchterhandt, a German international law expert, argues the Kremlin was legally entitled to counterattack but violated "the principle of proportionality" with its massive intervention in Georgia. Other commission members are also arguing that Russia is to be blamed.

** Der Speigel:EU Probe Creates Burden for Saakashvili

John Heilprin | United Nations | June 16

AP - What's in a name? Enough to anger Russia, which exercised its veto power in the U.N. Security Council and brought an end Monday to the nearly 16-year-old observer mission monitoring a cease-fire between Georgia and its breakaway Abkhazia region.

Russia's veto late Monday toppled a Western plan to extend the life of the U.N. mission for another year, or even two more weeks, to work out a compromise. The vote was 10-1 with four abstentions China, Vietnam, Libya and Uganda.

The mission's mandate will now expire at midnight Monday in New York, requiring about 130 military observers and more than a dozen police to leave. Both the name the U.N. Observer Mission in Georgia and references to Georgia's territorial sovereignty were sticking points.

"It is understandable," Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement Monday, "that in the new political and legal conditions most of the names and terms previously used in the old documents are inapplicable."

Also see from Registan: Iran Isn’t the Only Country Rioting

Sebastian Rotella | Paris | May 30

LA Times - Officials say they foiled a plot by Hezbollah and Iran to bomb the Israeli Embassy in revenge for the 2008 slaying of Imad Mughniyah. Anti-terrorism officials fear a new militant hub.

It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war.

Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.

Western anti-terrorism officials say the arrests a year ago thwarted swift retaliation by Hezbollah and Iran for the slaying of Imad Mughniyah, the legendary warlord of the Shiite Muslim militia based in Lebanon whose death was widely blamed on Israel.

The prosecution remained largely a secret until this week, when closed court proceedings began for two Lebanese and four Azeris charged with terrorism, espionage and other crimes.

Tbilisi | May 28

Reuters - Georgia's influential Orthodox church called on Thursday for snap elections or immediate dialogue to end an "explosive" stalemate between the opposition and President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The statement's recognition of elections as a potential way out will give the opposition new heart after seven weeks of street protests demanding Saakashvili resign over his record on democracy and last year's disastrous war with Russia.

"The situation in the country is explosive," Orthodox Patriarch Ilia II said in a statement.

"The authorities should take efficient steps that envisage holding early elections or the immediate start of negotiations," he added.

An opposition threat to block the main highway and the vital railway line, which some protesters blocked briefly on Tuesday night, deepened fears of violent confrontation in the former Soviet republic, a transit route for oil and gas to the West.

** Russia gets Abkhazian oil
** Georgians march through capital, call for reform
** Georgia says UN's Ban blackmailed by Russia

Ellen Barry | Moscow | May 17

NYT - Sergei Bagapsh wants to make it perfectly clear: Abkhazia is not now, and will not become, part of the Russian Federation.

Almost five years after being elected president of the breakaway Georgian territory, Mr. Bagapsh owes an enormous debt to Russia, his northern neighbor. Russia went to war last August to support Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s claims to independence from Georgia, and the Kremlin recognized both territories as sovereign nations, fulfilling the wish that has driven separatists through two decades of war and privation. No other country, he said, has shown “any concern for the Abkhaz people.”

But his gratitude is not without limits. With Russian border guards taking up long-term positions on Abkhazia’s periphery and Russian investors eager to buy up beachfront property, Mr. Bagapsh said Abkhaz independence remained a central worry. He also said he had been forced to push back on several occasions when Russian partners asked too high a price for their assistance.

“A small country is obliged to defend its statehood,” he said, in an interview in Moscow. “This is our main question now — that we should never again experience the kind of assimilation that Georgia forced on us.”

David Nowak | Moscow | May 16

LA Times - Former officials of Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia said Friday that tyranny and official corruption have flourished there following the Russian-Georgian war last summer.

Russia recognized South Ossetia and another separatist province as independent shortly after Russian forces repelled Georgia's effort to regain control over South Ossetia. Moscow has pledged more than $240 million in aid to South Ossetia.

But former South Ossetian security council head Anatoly Barankevich, who battled Georgian tanks during the conflict, said many residents have become disillusioned with life under pro-Russian leader Eduard Kokoity.

Speaking at a Moscow news conference before May 31 parliamentary elections in the province, Barankevich said hundreds of millions of dollars meant to rebuild homes, schools and hospitals have been misappropriated under Kokoity.

"What has happened practically a year after the war? Nothing. Not one apartment has been rebuilt, not one business has recuperated," Barankevich said.

"There are dozens of concrete examples of theft" of aid, he said

Ellen Barry | Sukhum, Georgia | May 8

NYT -

As night gathers over the Black Sea waterfront, a dozen pilgrims meet in the second-floor classroom where they are studying Abkhaz, the language of their new home.

The neighborhood has a decrepit, post-Soviet feel and is still pockmarked with bullet holes from Abkhazia’s war to separate from Georgia. At moments of weakness, when the task of learning Russian and Abkhaz is making her head swim, Selin Katsba longs for Istanbul, where she grew up.

Then she remembers herself. In Turkey, many ethnic Abkhaz she knows are toying with the idea of returning to the land their great-grandparents fled — especially now that it is under the protection of Russia. If she wavers, they will waver.

“In the eyes of my peers and my family, I am like a symbol and a leader because I have returned,” said Ms. Katsba, 22, who arrived here for a 15-day visit more than two years ago and never left. “It’s important that I stay.”

Now that Russia has recognized the territory as a sovereign nation, authorities hope ethnic Abkhaz will return from the places they fled to in the 19th century, in part to escape the expanding Russian empire. They hope that some percentage of the estimated half-million Abkhaz in Turkey will replenish Abkhazia’s Abkhaz, whose numbers have slipped below 100,000, and that entrepreneurs from the diaspora will provide new investment.

So far, the returnees are trailing in one by one, and no one expects a sudden influx. But if Abkhaz repatriation picks up speed, it could have a long-term effect, shoring up ties with Turkey, reaffirming its split from Georgia and lessening its reliance on Russia. Officials here say plans are afoot to build a mosque in the capital, a project that has been discussed for generations, and one that would signal a welcome to settlers.