Armenia
- On Monday, the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and India, Ararat Mirzoyan and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, met in New Delhi and signed two agreements. They signed cooperation agreements between the Sushma Sawaraj Institute of Foreign Service of India’s Foreign Ministry and the Armenian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic School. They also signed a memorandum of understanding between health and medical institutions in the two countries.
- During his speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs, Mirzoyan said that ‘comprehensive deepening of our partnership with India constitutes a foreign policy priority for Armenia’.
- The spokesperson of Armenia’s Foreign Ministry Affairs told Armenpress that it ‘is closely monitoring’ the developments in Syria, and that ‘there are no Armenian citizens among the victims’. Previously. Kantsasar, an Armenian magazine based in Syria reported that on 7 March, two Armenians — a father and his son were killed ‘at the entrance to Latakia’.
- The spokesperson of the Office of the High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs told CivilNet that evacuation of Armenians from Syria ‘is simply impossible at this time’ because of the ‘security conditions’. They also claimed that ‘local Armenians are not raising this issue at the moment’.
Azerbaijan
- Yesterday, Tofig Yagublu, a member of the opposition Musavat party and National Council Coordination Centre, was sentenced to nine years of prison in the Baku Grave Crimes Court. According to Meydan TV, Yabuglu said during his final statement in court that the charges pressed against him were ‘plucked out of thin air, and all of this is because I am an opposition politician’.
- The editor of the Argument.az website, Shamshad Aghayev (Agha), detained on smuggling charges and accused of collaborating with Meydan TV, sent a letter from prison. He responded to the accusations against him in the pro-government media outlet APA and said that the article was slander. ‘Our arrest and this wave of systematic repression is a political decision. No lies or manipulations can change the political motives of these arrests’, he concluded in his letter.
- The pro-government media outlet Report wrote that the State Security Service detained Nijat Huseynov, an employee of the State Tourism Agency, as a suspect and brought him to court, where he was remanded into custody on charges of abuse of power while performing official duties.
- By a decree of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, State Tourism Agency chair Fuad Naghiyev was severely reprimanded for shortcomings in his work. Several officials of the agency, including the head of the agency's staff, Kanan Gasimov, and the head of the Tourism Policy and Strategy Department, Mahammad Muradov, were removed from their positions.
- A bipartisan group of US Congress lawmakers has prepared a bill calling for the release of Gubad Ibadoghlu with the demand that export of spare parts for Aliyev’s plane be banned. According to the text of the draft bill, titled ‘on restricting the export of aircraft engines from Azerbaijan’, the export of spare parts for Aliyev's planes is prohibited until Gubad Ibadoglu, a popular pro-democracy figure, is released from house arrest. The bill requires the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to submit a report to the relevant congressional committees no later than 30 days.
Georgia
- Bidzina Ivanishvili’s former aide, businessman Giorgi Bachiashvili, who fled Georgia last week due to safety concerns, has been sentenced to 11 years in absentia by the Tbilisi City Court. He is accused of stealing profits of Bitcoin sales from Ivanishvili.
- US Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, both senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have introduced the MEGOBARI Act in the Senate. The act mandates further sanctions against Georgian officials as well as support for Georgian media and civil society.
South Ossetia
- President Alan Gagloev has been discharged from a hospital in Vladikavkaz and his health is stable, according to North Ossetian President Sergei Menyailo. Gagloev was hospitalised on 6 March due to a hypertensive event.
The North Caucasus
- Chechen authorities demanded on Monday that the decision to block Telegram in the region be reconsidered. The local blocking of the Telegram messenger in Chechnya is ‘unjustified and not rational’, the region’s Press Minister Akhmed Dudaev wrote in his Telegram channel. Late last night, Daghestan’s Digital Development Ministry also made a similar demand.
- On Monday, at a meeting with Chechen human rights defender Mansur Soltaev and Akhmed Dudaev, relatives of Chechens accused of involvement in the Wildberries shooting, said that their relatives were simply passing by the scene of the crime and were innocent. Their relatives were among more than 30 arrested in the deadly shooting which led to the deaths of two people.
- The Daghestan Directorate of the Investigative Committee has announced the arrest of a local resident on suspicion of involvement in a terrorist community.
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.
