The Bug Pit
Russia's Duma has passed, and President Dmitry Medvedev has ratified, an agreement allowing the Russian military to maintain bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia for 49 years, with automatic 15-year extensions after that.
India's defense minister AK Antony visited Tajikistan this week on his way to Russia, which served as an occasion to revive rumors that India might yet use the Ayni air base near Dushanbe.
Iran's movement of an oil rig toward Azerbaijan's territorial waters in the Caspian Sea in 2009 caused Baku to fret about its lack of military capacity to handle such a threat, and to seek advice from U.S. officials on what to do, recently released Wikileaks cables show.
Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov is betting on NATO rather than the CSTO to help secure his country as the U.S. forces begin to leave Afghanistan in 2014, according to a report on the website uzmetronom (in Russian).
Since the U.S. has moved to remove human rights-related restrictions from military aid to Uzbekistan, the Obama administration has been criticized for abandoning its scruples for the sake of Tashkent's cooperation on hosting supply lines to Afghanistan. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about that yesterday, and she said there has been progress on human rights and political freedoms:
Most of the coverage of the news that the U.S. has decided to resume military aid (specifically, money to buy equipment, or Foreign Military Financing) has focused on why the U.S. did it, including this story from yesterday on EurasiaNet. But another question is: what does Uzbekistan get out of it? An obvious answer is, money, but the amount of money in question (at least so far) is very small, $100,000.
Is Russia Training Kazakhstan's Military To Protect American Oil From Iranian Attack?
That's the provocative conclusion reached by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, which seems to have gotten a hold of a document discussing the scenario of the Tsentr-2011 military exercises between Russia and several Central Asian countries that wrapped up today.
A couple of weeks ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmahinejad visited Dushanbe, and Tajikistan's defense minister Sherali Khairulloyev made a statement that raised some eyebrows around the region:
Mongolia's defense minister has said the country is planning to send 850 peacekeepers to South Sudan, according to Xinhua:
"Sending soldiers to South Sudan, which is a newly independent country with civil war, is a matter of honor," the minister said...