After the Revolution

This is an update to my Jan. 17 post about presidential candidate and media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili.
The court may have found yet another problem with Patarkatsishvili’s long-hounded broadcast company, Imedi TV — the fact that he might have illegally retained some ownership of it while campaigning for president.
After Patarkatsishvili announced his bid for the presidency in […]

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Russian police arrested Semyon Mogilevich, a 61-year old mob boss, on tax evasion charges last week.
Mogilevich is allegedly connected to RosUkrEnergo, a trading company half owned by Russian energy company Gazprom and half controlled by two Ukrainian businessmen.
RosUkrEnergo, an entity with a mashed multisyllabic name straight out of the USSR, was created in 2006 to resolve an energy dispute culminating with Russia’s cutting off Ukraine’s natural gas supply.
Ukrainian Prime […]

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The World Trade Organization announced on its Web site on Jan. 25 that Ukraine, after 14 years of negotiations, has finally put together an agreement that could allow it to become a member of the WTO in August.
The General Council of the WTO will consider the agreement at its Feb. 5 meeting. If Ukraine ratifies the deal by […]

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In his blog, “This is Tbilisi Calling,” journalist and author Matthew Collin provided a link to a EurasiaNet audio slideshow portraying displaced ethnic Georgians who fled the breakaway region of Abkhazia during the civil war there.
Since I’ve been on the topic of breakaway regions, I’ll give a little history of Abkhazia.
The Abkhaz people are closely related to Russians in the North […]

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Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, has said a declaration of independence for the region is days away. Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia.
The BBC ran an article today raising the question of whether recognition of Kosovo’s independence would bring the spotlight back to the breakaway republic of South Ossetia in Georgia.
Georgia declared its independence […]

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Condoleeza Rice told Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko today that the United States supports a recent request that NATO accept Ukraine into its Membership Action Plan (MAP).
Rice and Yushchenko spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Yushchenko, Parliamentary Speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko all signed a letter Jan. 2 requesting Ukraine be considered for eventual NATO membership.
NATO will […]

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EurasiaNet.org has posted a collection of audio slideshows based on interviews with Kyrgyz citizens about the state of Kyrgyzstan since the Tulip Revolution of 2005. The interviews covered a variety of topics and in general expressed disappointment with the results of the revolution.

Andrei Tsvetkov
Executive Director, NTS Television
Tsvetkov discusses the misfortune of being robbed while trying […]

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Mikheil Saakashvili was sworn in as president of Georgia on Jan. 20 after an election internationally recognized as flawed but generally accepted as valid.
The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published a review of the electoral process specifying a number of problems.

The voter turn-out was much […]

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With about 80,000 Georgians protesting elsewhere in the capital, Mikheil Saakashvili was sworn as president on Jan. 20.
Saakashvili said he would strive to strengthen Georgia’s relationship with the West. But he also offered an olive branch to Russia.
Georgia expelled Russian officers from the country in 2006 on charges of espionage. In response, Russia forbade all Georgians from traveling to Russia, a restriction they later eased. 
But Russia […]

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The Freedom House Freedom in the World 2008 survey, covering events from Jan. 1, 2007, to Dec. 31, 2007, indicated that in Georgia, political rights and civil liberties had diminished since the previous poll for the second year in a row. According to the report, the government restricted political rights by calling a “state of […]

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