Word: russian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iran's President attends the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (comprising Russia, China and four Central Asian nations) and also speaks briefly with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov endorses Ahmadinejad and says, "We welcome the fact that the elections have taken place, and we welcome the newly re-elected Iranian President on the Russian soil." During the summit itself, Ahmadinejad says "America is enveloped in economic and political crises, and there is no hope for their resolution." Neither the Iranian election nor unrest were mentioned...
...energy sector. And Ross doesn't want to stop there. The U.S. has pushed Russia, a major trading partner of Iran's, to be ready to commit to sanctions on businesses unrelated to Iran's nuclear program - something Russia has resisted. In a secret letter in early February to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama wrote that the U.S. would abandon its plans for missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic - which the U.S. has always justified by referring to an Iranian threat - if Russia would help bring Iran into compliance with its international nuclear obligations. Back home, Ross...
...both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region - dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes - is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies vulnerable to domestic upheaval. "There is the possibility for really unpredictable change," says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And it's change few Central Asia watchers expect to be positive. While great powers vie for resources and influence, countries that were once seen as a bulwark against more turbulent nations to the south and west are themselves lurching toward...
...Still, Central Asia exists on the periphery for most policy makers in the U.S. When not the illusory realm of Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University...
...rich Kazakhstan - at least a tenth of the Tajik population of 7 million is migrant labor. Remittances sent home comprise some 40% of the country's total GDP, according to UN figures, and account for only slightly less in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Now, with the collapse of the Russian economy and the drying up of its construction boom, tens of thousands are returning to rugged homelands that offer few opportunities and to families that depended on their labor abroad. Observers in Tajikistan tell of depressed village after village where groups of unemployed men amble around. The situation "is a potential...