News

Azerbaijan and Armenia have decided to continue negotiations on settling the Karabakh conflict within the OSCE Minsk Group, and later in June the co-chairs of the Group will visit the conflict region again.

On June 8, some 60 prisoners of women's colony in Tbilisi announced a hunger strike demanding revision of their verdicts.

Dmitri Oreshkin, a Russian political scientist, believes that the current presidents of Chechnya and Ingushetia are gainful for the Kremlin: Ramzan Kadyrov controls Chechnya, and Murat Zyazikov is loyal to the Russian leadership.

At the debate held on June 8 in Stepanakert on the topic "People's Diplomacy: Challenges and Opportunities", representatives of Karabakh NGOs and state structures registered a change in Azerbaijani tactics towards settling the Karabakh conflict.

Victoria Nuland, US Ambassador to NATO, asserts that Ukraine and Georgia, whose accession to NATO's Membership Action Plan was postponed till December, are not yet ready to become members of the Alliance.

In their essence, the amendment in the Electoral Code, recently approved by the Parliament of Azerbaijan, create no legal guarantees for eliminating the main problems on the road towards free and fair elections. This conclusion was made by the experts of the Election Monitoring Centre (EMC).

The bodies of three young men killed in the Hasavyurt District on June 7 as a result of a skirmish with militiamen in Dagestan have been identified. Two of them had been searched.

In the district of Vanatur of the Razdan city in Armenia, a hunger strike with a demand to release all political prisoners was launched by war veterans of the voluntary regiment Arshavir Bazinyan, Ashot Nersisyan, Norik Sarkisyan, Samvel Panosyan, Eduard Sarkisyan and widow Janet Nersisyan.

In Rostov-on-Don, ecology activists have started to bag subscriptions under a petition of townspeople to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev with an appeal to refrain from building new nuclear power plants.

Today, the capital of Georgia hosted the first sitting of the parliament of the new convocation elected on May 21. The sitting was attended by President of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili and Catholicos Patriarch of all Georgia Elias the Second.

Tonight, Sochi will host the opening ceremony of the 21st "Kinotaurus" Open Russian Movie Festival. In total, the jury will choose among 14 films, 9 of them made by debutants.

Restoration of the railway in Abkhazia can take more than two months, said Sergey Shamba, head of the Abkhazian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when making comments on the statement of the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation Anatoly Serdyukov that the units of the railway troops of Russia will leave the territory of Abkhazia within the nearest two months.

President of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov has signed a new law on election of deputies to the Parliament of Chechnya, according to which the legislature will become unicameral.

Despite the doubts of its individual members, the United Opposition of Georgia sticks to its decision to boycott the work of the new parliament, which has appointed its first session on June 7.

Yuri Trutnev, Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of the Russian Federation, believes that the claims put forward by ecologists in the context of preparation for 2014 Sochi Olympiad can undermine the image of Russia.

St-Petersburg was the venue of the first meeting of Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Serzh Sarkisyan and Ilham Aliev have agreed to continue negotiations on settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the basis of Madrid proposals.

Today, the Kuntsevo District Court of Moscow has stopped the operation of the website "Ingushetia.Ru", thus having satisfied the claim of the Prosecutor's Office of Ingushetia, which stuck to the opinion that the site was disseminating extremist information.

Javier Solana, High Commissioner of the European Union on Foreign Policy and Safety, has discussed the issues settling the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict with Abkhazian leaders.

Tigran Sarkisyan, former Chairman of the Central Bank of the Republic of Armenia and nowadays the Prime Minister of the country, has lodged a claim on protection of his honour, dignity and professional reputation against Grant Bagratyan, leader of the oppositional non-parliamentary party "Azatyutyun" (Freedom), who was the prime minister of Armenia in 1993-1996.

During several recent days, in the Gudermes and Vedeno Districts of Chechnya, several burials have been detected. The authorities of Chechnya assert that all the casualties fell victims of extrajudicial executions of the militaries of the "Vostok" (East) battalion commanded by Sulim Yamadaev.