This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
Twenty years ago, the worst episode of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorny Karabakh occurred near the small town of Khojali, where more than 400 Azerbaijanis fleeing the town were killed by Armenian soldiers or paramilitary fighters.
Islam is increasingly becoming a factor in the politics of the wider Caucasus region, as Azerbaijan experiences a growth of religion in politics and Turkey and Iran compete for Islamic influence on their neighbors.
Russia has been in a post-empire state for the last 20 years. There is no way back to an empire now—Russia has passed the point of no return in this respect.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, Russia has substantial leverage in the post-Soviet space and is the EU's most important neighbor. However, in the coming decades Russia will face serious internal and international challenges.
Turkey is a particularly critical key actor for building a Euro-Atlantic Security Community, with a growing influence within the Euro-Atlantic region.
Today, unprecedented challenges from without and within threaten to reverse the progress toward the safe, secure, undivided Euro-Atlantic world hoped for in the wake of the Cold War. To overcome that future, a twenty-first-century problem demands a twenty-first-century solution.
One of the fundamental impediments to molding the Euro-Atlantic nations into a more unified and workable security community is the lingering distrust that poisons too many of the region’s key relationships.
If Georgian President Saakashvili can leave the scene gracefully when his term ends and allow a more pluralistic politics to emerge in Georgia after him, he will set a good example to the rest of the former Soviet Union, Russia included.
Without intellectual efforts it is impossible to find a viable solution to the dire post-August 2008 reality, which put both Georgia and Russia in an extremely difficult situation.
Almost two decades after negotiations began Russia is set to join the World Trade Organization. Russia, the biggest country to enter the WTO since China joined ten years ago, is expected to be confirmed as a member during the ministerial meeting in mid-December.