Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon the Prophet Muhammad, his family, companions and all those who followed them till the Day of Judgment!

Out of all the regions of the North Caucasus, Ingushetia is focused on most today. People inside and outside Russia have different versions for why the situation in this republic has become so unstable even compared with “hot” regions such as Chechnya or Dagestan.

In April 2003 22-year-old Artur Akhmatkhanov was grabbed by masked soldiers and bundled into an armoured personnel carrier. He has not been seen since.

Azeri demonstrators called on the European Union on Tuesday to condemn Armenian war crimes in the disputed area of Nagorno Karabakh, 16 years after one of the most notorious massacres in the conflict.

Some time has now passed since the tragic deportation of the Ingush people on February 23 1944, but the injury and the sense of the injustice still live on in people’s memories. This collective memory has survived and goes on surviving, despite the inhuman and anti-patriotic attempts to erase it …

Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom threatened on Tuesday to cut gas supplies to Ukraine by 25 percent from March 3 over arrears, two weeks after the two ex-Soviet states agreed on how to settle the problem.

President Putin has said Russia could redirect its missiles to target Ukraine if Kyiv joined NATO. According to RFE/RL’s guest authors, that kind of talk is representative of an increasingly truculent foreign policy, which goes largely unchallenged by Russia’s political elite.

An offhand comment by President Vladimir Putin during his recent swing through the North Caucasus should have alerted both Russians and the world of a very serious problem: Besides some speeches and press releases filled with bravado, Moscow has done very little to prepare for the Sochi Olympics.

Thirty percent of the 101,344 newborns in Moscow last year were children of migrant parents from the former Soviet republics and other foreign countries, a share far greater than these groups now form in the city’s population and one that means their percentage of its residents will increase even if …

Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom threatened on Tuesday to cut gas supplies to Ukraine by 25 percent from March 3 over arrears, two weeks after the two ex-Soviet states agreed on how to settle the problem.