Eurasia News Week in Review - April 11, 2014 Share This /

This week analysts largely dismissed the impact of NATO’s increased engagement in the South Caucasus while Russian officials touted the country’s military assistance to Central Asia. Below is a roundup of these stories and some of the other top articles and news highlights from around Central Eurasia over the last week:

Region wide:

• The House Armed Services Committee held a hearing to examine the Fiscal Year 2015 budget request for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which manages the Defense Department’s counterproliferation activities, including the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program. The CTR program has historically assisted countries in the former Soviet Union to neutralize their weapons of mass destruction capabilities, though in recent years the program has expanded around the world. As DTRA’s Director, Kenneth Myers, explained, the program’s successes in the former Soviet Union prompted a global expansion, so that the agency could stay “one step ahead of the threat.” Despite this enlargement, Myers’ written testimony included a breakdown of the FY2015 CTR budget request, which still dedicated millions of dollars to projects in the Eurasia region.

South Caucasus:

• In a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on security challenges in Central and Eastern Europe, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Derek Chollet, stated that Russia’s behavior has “increased the sense of direct threat” in Georgia and Moldova. Chollet said that the United States is looking to further support these countries and announced that an interagency delegation is slated to visit Georgia later this month. During the hearing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) also advocated for NATO to grant Georgia a Membership Action Plan later this year.
• One of Georgia’s two battalions in Afghanistan started a six-month mission under U.S. leadership in the Kandahar Air Base, following training by U.S. and Georgian instructors.
• Analyst and blogger Joshua Kucera examined NATO’s recent announcement that it hopes to boost cooperation with Azerbaijan and Armenia, and noted that this enhanced cooperation is unlikely to transform the alliance’s marginal role in the region.
• The head of Russia’s Federal Security Service said that cooperation with Georgia’s security agency helped prevent terrorist attacks during the Sochi Olympics.
• Azerbaijan’s Deputy Foreign Minister expressed frustration with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group (co-chaired by the United States, France and Russia), saying that the group is not “searching for a common position” to solve the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
• The U.S. Park Police conducted a K-9 narcotics detection course for Georgian law enforcement officers working at the Tbilisi International Airport.
• Officials from the United States and Armenia pledged closer cooperation to prevent nuclear smuggling during meetings late last week.

Central Asia:

• Russia’s head of the Defense and Security Committee in the parliament’s upper house, Viktor Ozerov, stated that Russia has the right to halt NATO transit to Afghanistan through its territory after the alliance suspended cooperation with Russia last week.
• The U.S. Air Force’s medical contingency at the Manas Transit Center inactivated on Saturday, though it will maintain a small presence at the base until it closes on July 11.
• The OSCE concluded a patrolling and leadership training course for Tajik border guards as part of the OSCE’s efforts to improve security along the Tajik – Afghan border.
• Russia’s deputy minister of defense touted his country’s military assistance to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to bolster the countries’ security following NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting the assistance amounts to billions of Russian rubles.
• Kyrgyzstan’s political opposition held rallies across the country on Thursday, protesting a variety of issues from the country’s relations with Russia to the detention of a former parliament speaker. In Bishkek, over a hundred protestors were arrested for demonstrating outside of permitted areas, though all detainees were released within a few hours.