When your gas bill is past due and the supply is turned off, having a friend with cash is priceless. With a Russian bill collector at his neck and faced with a gas brownout in Europe, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko phoned his well-heeled counterpart from Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to ask if he could spare a couple of hundred million dollars. No worries at all, Aliyev said.
“I asked Ilham Aliyev and within 24 hours, or even less, he lent me $200 million,” Lukashenko told Euronews on June 25. “We paid 187 million of that to Gazprom.” The multimillion-dollar check from Baku settled a politically charged Moscow-Minsk dispute that had briefly put part of Europe on a low-hydrocarbon diet.
“The Russian side has finally found the time . . . to satisfy Grigol Vashadze’s application for cancellation of his Russian citizenship," Deputy Foreign Minister Davit Jalagania told a June 28 briefing.
Following the 2008 war with Georgia, Russian parliamentarian Semion Bogdasarov asked Russia's State Duma to deprive Vashadze of his Russian citizenship because of his close association with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who tops the Kremlin’s persona non grata list. The Duma denied the requested, but then Vashadze himself ditched his Russian passport. Vashadze is married to Georgian prima ballerina Nino Ananiashvili, a former Bolshoi Ballet star who is a godmother of Saakashvili’s younger son, Nikoloz.
"It would have been better for me to become a doctor than do this ungrateful work," sighed embattled Armenian Education Minister Armen Ashotian in a June 23 interview with Hetq.am.
Critics, who interpret "foreign language" as "Russian language," fear a return to Soviet-era days when Armenian-language schools lagged far behind Russian-language schools in quality.
Rebuking Ankara for allowing its cultural cousin and strategic ally Azerbaijan get in the way of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, Sargsyan claimed that Turkey’s relations with Azerbaijan undermine regional security and reconciliation. “A pair of pipelines going to your neighbor is not going to bring you the security and welfare you want,” reasoned Sargsyan in reference to Azerbaijani energy exports, a trump card in Baku’s dealings with Ankara.
Sargsyan was not reported as addressing Armenia’s own role in the failure of the talks with Turkey.
When it comes to failure, no South Caucasus country can hold a candle to war-survivor Georgia in the estimation of the 2010 Failed State Index.
Foreign invasion, little ability to exercise control over its borders and 2008-war-related domestic grievances keep the country's total score (91.8) high on a 120-point scale. Georgia fell between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the Index, assembled by Foreign Policy and The Fund for Peace, a Washington, DC-based research organization.
Criteria such as Refugees and Delegitimization of State as well as Uneven Development bring Azerbaijan (84.6) up on the failure list, where it landed slightly ahead of Israel.
Armenia was ranked as the least "failed" of the three South Caucasus states with a score of 74.3.
As seemingly always, Norway is ranked as the world's most successful country.
The website for the de facto Abkhaz government notes that Bagapsh expressed "regret" about the presence of such war ruins in the capital, Sokhumi, and other towns, and "particularly along the central highway."
The demolition order in question will apply to the road stretching from north of the capital, Sokhumi, to Ochamchira, a Black Sea port town slotted to host a Russian naval base.
The news sent a ripple of anger across Tbilisi, where it was interpreted as targeted against ethnic Georgians who fled the region after the war. Officials have warned Sokhumi against demolishing private property legally owned by Georgians. In practical terms, however, Tbilisi has few options at its disposal to influence decision-making in Abkhazia.
Those steeped in the Caucasus tradition of drinking wine know that when somebody toasts you, you should toast them back in gratitude. Likewise, Moscow could not leave unanswered Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's June 21 claims that Russia’s four-year ban on Georgian wine has only improved its quality since Georgian wine companies were forced to export to more selective markets.
The Russian food safety administration (Rospotrebnadzor) “was right to stop the inflow of the suspicious mixture,” declared the administration's chief, Genadiy Onishchenko, on June 22. “At one point, at the beginning of this epoch of our confrontation, I said that the time will come when Georgian winemakers will thank me [for the ban], just like the Moldovan ones.”
Onishchenko added that Georgians are welcome to ask for the return of Georgian wine to Russian stores.
Time will tell. But given the bitter differences between the two countries over Russia's post-war behavior toward breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it's unlikely that Tbilisi and Moscow will be raising a glass of Kinzmarauli together anytime soon.
Armenia and Azerbaijan on June 21 clashed for the second time in roughly three days on the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline, RFE/RL reports. The skirmish, which allegedly killed one Azerbaijani soldier, comes after a June 18-19 gunfire exchange that killed four Armenian soldiers and one Azerbaijani soldier -- the worst violation of the Nagorno-Karabakh cease-fire since 2008.
Mediators pleaded with both sides to tone down the aggressive rhetoric that has accompanied the violence, which started the day after the conclusion of a St. Petersburg summit between Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Where is Armenia's economy? Well, to hear the World Bank’s country chief tell it, more than a third of the economy is closeted away in a world impervious to accounting and tax collection. Light must be shed on the shadow economy for Armenia to make ends meet, Airstomene Varoudakis said at a June 18 press conference.
“It is a very important challenge to formalize this informal economy so as to increase tax revenues and be able to pay for much-needed social services,” he said.
Armenia’s government described poor tax administration as one of the weakest spots in its economic stewardship and promised a massive overhaul of the system. That would mean a “softer” regime for business owners and fewer encounters with tax collectors.
Varoudakis said the World Bank will provide $25 million to underwrite the reform. The World Bank, IMF and Russia have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid to blunt the effects of the global financial crisis, a sharp decrease in foreign remittances and bust of the country's construction bubble.
