... Pakistan and India. Their own scale and demographics make absorption and full integration with Russia and Central Asia impossible. At the same time, there are historically strong and fundamental ties between this region and such Central Asian countries as Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Afghanistan itself is a clear dividing line between East and West, North and South, underpinned by its mountainous topography and complex ethnic composition. An important common task for Russia and the Central Asian states may be to maintain relative ...
... Nagorno-Karabakh in this sense.
Alexander Yermakov:
Challenges to Eurasian Security in the Coming Decade
After the Soviet collapse, Russia has been involved in the Central Asian political disorder first-hand. During the 1990s, a violent civil war struck Tajikistan, while the beginning of the new century started with the US military intervention in Afghanistan. Later on, new ethnic tensions mounted in the Fergana Valley, two revolutions erupted in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan was shocked by the Andjan massacre and by the rise of the Islamic Movement.
A series of issues concerning Russia’s economic stability ...
The Working Group on the Future of U.S.-Russia Relations’ Report
Central Asia stands out as a comparatively “nontoxic” region where there are limited, but not insignificant, opportunities for U.S.-Russia collaboration both bilaterally and within multilateral frameworks: in the space industry, civil security, job-creation mechanisms and rural human capital, and knowledge sharing for instance. Any proposal of U.S.-Russia cooperation in a concrete domain will have to be made in a tri- or-multipartite...
... created in the course of the following meetings in order to cover specific areas of cooperation. What is the essence of the new format? It has been since 2001 that the USA was deeply involved in the regional affairs in terms of anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan and the creation of Northern Distribution Network. The U.S. and Uzbekistan were in close cooperation on Afghan issue, Kyrgyzstan was hosting Manas Air Base that closed only in 2014, and Tajikistan hosted the Ainy facility. USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, is actively operating in Central Asia, and the U.S. is one of the major donors in Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. has been implementing the New Silk Road initiative since ...
... tensions among the populations of post-Soviet countries
[3]
, economic problems, corruption, cronyism, and other factors, it is difficult to seriously discuss their effective ability to counter the threats of extremism and terrorism that emanate from Afghanistan.
Of all the Central Asian states, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan appear to be the most vulnerable in this respect, due to their proximity to Afghanistan, setting aside for a moment the fact that these two former Soviet republics have porous borders open both to drug trafficking and to the ...
Interview with Vladimir Zakharov
On September 12, 2014, the capital of Tajikistan hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s annual summit, which saw the signing of the Dushanbe Declaration,... ... tensions. This success results from both Tajik diplomacy and multilateral SCO efforts.
The Dushanbe Declaration statement on Afghanistan does not outline a solid SCO position on the deteriorating situation and does not offer Kabul any help, meaning that ...