In April 2026, the PSCR program has prepared analytical materials covering a wide range of developments in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine.
Alexander Shpunt provides a comprehensive analysis of the decision by the Georgian authorities, officially dismantling the so-called Provisional Administration of South Ossetia. It took just a couple of months to finalize the abolishment by January 1, 2026. This body was an institutional manifestation of the Georgian policy of non-recognition of the separatist entities on its territory and of the consensus regarding the country’s territorial integrity shaped under Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. The decision was taken de facto unilaterally by the parliamentarians from the ruling “Georgian Dream” party, often considered pro-Russian and blamed for re-orienting Georgian foreign policy from the Euro-Atlantic track towards reconciliation with Moscow. Although the operational scope of the Provisional Administration has been limited in recent years, many observers view the decision as yet another symbolic step away from the recent decades’ pro-European path and as an acknowledgment that hopes for re-integrating South Ossetia are in effect abandoned. However, the municipal administrations for Georgia’s regions included in South Ossetian territory continue to operate in exile, as does the exiled Government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, meaning that “Georgian Dream” is still not ready to abandon the “formal architecture of non-recognition” altogether.
The PSCRP team has prepared a material discussing the upcoming parliamentary elections in Armenia set for June 7, 2026, against the background of what the authors called an intense media campaign to remove the incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from his post. This campaign, as the authors frame it, is led by the Russian state media, and at the same time by the Armenian diaspora in the U.S. (notably, ANCA). Pashinyan’s visit to Moscow in April 2026, when the Armenian PM rebuffed the arguments voiced by Vladimir Putin regarding the future of Russian-Armenian cooperation, served as a starting point for a “state media offensive”: “Every major Russian state-aligned outlet framed Pashinyan as ungrateful, deluded, or outright treacherous.” Apart from this, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Armenian embassy in Moscow during Pashinyan’s visit. Indeed, the PM’s “Civil Contract” party advocates for normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, enhanced partnership with the U.S., and potential EU accession; all these points are viewed with suspicion from both Moscow and Armenian diaspora circles, with the U.S.-initiated TRIPP corridor being one of the “hinge issues” in the relevant discussions.
The PSCRP team has analyzed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Azerbaijan in April 2026. The Ukrainian president’s first trip to the South Caucasus since 2022 was marked by a discussion of military-technical cooperation between Kyiv and Baku, Zelenskyy’s proposal to hold trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US in Azerbaijan, and Ilham Aliyev’s expression of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. While the nationalist ecosystem on Telegram responded to the summit in Gabala with invectives and alternative explanations, the Russian state media reported on the event without any substantive analytical commentary and traditional triumphalism, confining itself to factual reports and “institutional minimalism,” which the authors find telling in itself.
Boris Ginzburg provides a careful reassessment of what some media sources dubbed the “first official meeting” between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Vilnius in January 2026. He proposes several explanations for Kyiv’s motives to end the previously maintained “strategic distancing” of the Belarusian opposition. First, Ginzburg thinks that Zelenskyy might want to strengthen the latter’s pro-European camp, since the stance of several prominent opposition leaders released by Minsk in December 2025 on the Russian-Ukrainian war might be described as “ambiguous.” Second, Kyiv might try to gain leverage in negotiations with Washington by counter-signaling the incumbent administration’s potential rapprochement with the official Minsk. Third, this move could be seen as an investment in Ukraine’s relations with Lithuania and Poland, so as to promote Ukraine’s fast-track EU accession. Fourth, Zelenskyy’s change in communication strategy, which has become visibly harsher since January 2026, might serve domestic political needs, to create a “strongman-image” if the presidential elections are to take place.
Velvl Chernin presents his analytical overview of the book “The Path to Freedom” by Ruslan Gabbasov, one of the leaders of the “Bashkort” Bashkir nationalist organization (banned in Russia in 2020), who was designated by the Russian authorities as a foreign agent and an extremist. The book is a programmatic document for the Bashkir nationalist movement, advocating the establishment of an independent Bashkir state as the only means to resist what Gabbasov calls “forced assimilation.” He sees the chance for such developments in the political crisis that might hypothetically emerge in Russia as a result of the ongoing war. Gabbasov envisions a Western-style democracy as an ideal for the Bashkir state, but only when ethnic Bashkirs become the majority; before this, autocracy is needed. Turkic post-Soviet states, especially Kazakhstan, are regarded as models, and a pan-Turkic political unity is a goal to be achieved. Bashkir nationalists, according to Gabbasov, should rely on a small and active nationalist elite and act in close cooperation with other national movements. The book’s author advocates for the migration of “ethnically close populations” to the independent Bashkortostan, sketches both “minimal” and “maximal” territorial claims, underlines the importance of Islam as an “ethnic symbol,” and calls for armed confrontation with what he labels “occupational authorities.” Although more an interesting artefact than a political program having any realistic potential, the book still captures a mindset widespread in certain circles associated with the “national movements” in Russia’s regions and in emigration.
Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman continues his monitoring of the public narratives surrounding the U.S./Israeli-Iranian war in the Central Asian countries. On social media, conspiracy narratives are widely shared, including those of Israeli/Jewish control over world politics, and reports of Iran’s “successes” in the war. The main sections of the anti-Israeli sentiment on social media in Central Asia are Islamist-fundamentalist discourse (focused on pan-Islamic solidarity and spread through the Arab, Turkish, and Iranian media), Western left-radical discourse (focused on anti-imperial and anti-colonial narratives), and Russian-language anti-Western discourse. The fusion of these sources “creates an informational landscape in which religious solidarity, geopolitical resentment, and conspiracy narratives reinforce one another.”
Nati Cantorovich documents the recent surge in antisemitic discourse across the countries of the former Soviet Union. Since June 2025, when the operation “Rising Lion” was launched, the external influence (mainly from Iranian and Hamas-affiliated sources) has transformed from marginal to core components of mainstream propaganda in several regions and countries, with the narratives being based on a “synthesis of classical antisemitism, Soviet-era anti-Zionism, and modern geopolitical grievances, alongside radical Christian and Islamic religious motifs.” When the “Lion’s Roar” operation started, most prominent narratives in the post-Soviet hate discourse were global Jewish control, radical religious rhetoric (including blood libel), Nazi comparisons as a way for delegitimizing Zionism, competing victimhood, and more locally rooted propaganda motifs (like the Jewish origin of opposition figures, the “hypocrisy” of political emigrants who left for Israel, the strategic conflation of Ukrainian and Israeli policies, etc.). If in Central Asian and Caucasian states, this discourse was largely confined to social media, in Belarus, as Cantorovich notes, “hate speech is spearheaded by the highest echelons of the regime’s media apparatus.” In this regard, the situation in Russia is different, since overt antisemitic expressions are normally confined to only the “second or third tier of the propaganda hierarchy.”
Last but not least, Alexander Shpunt presents his monthly overview of important new academic publications focused on the post-Soviet space.