Senior officials from the Pakistani army and Afghan government will be holding open peace talks with the Taliban, marking the first joint effort towards a diplomatic by the two countries simultaneously. Ashraf Ghani’s government is under fire by the new Parliament for negotiating with Pakistan to the degree it has – even former President Hamid…
A letter sent by 47 US senators to Iranian negotiators has been openly decried by Iran’s chief foreign policy representative. Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, lambasted the letter as lacking in any legal value and as a “propaganda ploy.” Zarif went on to note that the letter is unprecedented in diplomatic history, and a…
Chinese officials announced yesterday that they will buy new natural gas reserves piped in from Western Siberia, another move suggesting Russia’s pivot to the east in reaction to sanctions that cut its economy off from Western capital and retail markets. The agreement specifically is between Gazprom and CNPC (both state-owned oil and gas entities) to…
Officials coming from the latest round of talks of the Caspian littoral states (Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Russia, and Kazakhstan) have reported major progress in delineating regions of authority in the Caspian Sea. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ibrahim Rahimpour reported that he was confident that the dispute and outline could be resolved by the time of the…
A Dushanbe court sentenced leading civil activist Umedjon Solehov to a prison term of 17 years in absentia for “insulting the president,” among other charges. The Ismoili Somoni court handed down the sentenced after Solehov purportedly appeared in a video during a Moscow rally in which he criticized Tajik president Emomali Rahmon and called for his…
The Ukrainian central bank will raise its benchmark refinancing rate to 30%, a more than 10% increase of the current rate of 19.5%. The bank taking this step has been expected, as inflation rates are increasing rapidly and the hryvnia has lost nearly half of its value during 2015. The move by the central bank…
China officially launched a behemoth $79.8 billion infrastructure project in its northwestern province of Gansu. The project, while beginning in Gansu, a region of China that shares no land borders with any Central Asian nation, is merely the starting point for a series of large infrastructure development projects which will encompass much of Central Asia.…
Longtime dissident and former deputy prime minister of Russia Boris Nemtsov was shot four times in the back and killed in an attack that has left Russian civil society in an uproar. In the weeks before his death, Nemtsov constantly raised suspicions that he would be targeted by the Putin regime for assassination. Nemtsov was one of…
Dr. Alexander Cooley is Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, as well as Deputy Director for Social Sciences Programming at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. Professor Cooley has researched and written extensively on the impact of external actors on the Former Soviet Union, and is the author of Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great…
The Ukrainian central bank began to severely restrict access to foreign currencies on Wednesday in an attempt to curb a sharp drop in the hryvnia, and then rapidly changed course, lifting the ban on foreign currency purchases. Ukraine’s economy has worsened due to infighting over legislation in the Ukrainian parliament and the related inability to…
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