Iran’s deepening engagement with Central Asia is no accident. It reflects a deliberate strategy to exploit power vacuum and turn the Islamic Republic into a central player in the region’s economic and political landscape.
PSCRP
In May 2025, the operative analysis published by the PSCR program at BESA has extensively focused on the ongoing and potential conflicts in Central Asia, South and North Caucasus, Russia, and Moldova.
On May 21, the Chisinau Court of Appeal left the head of the Gagauz autonomy, Eugenia Gutul, under house arrest. Gutul was detained at the Chisinau airport and arrested in a criminal case related to the financing of her election campaign in 2023. This arrest opens the way for the initiation of the procedure for removing the head of the dissident autonomous region from office. The legitimate parliament of Gagauzia, the People's Assembly, has effectively come out against the supreme power of Moldova and has expressed full support for Gutul.
The overall situation between Armenia and Azerbaijan has undergone substantial changes in recent years. Both are engaged in peace negotiations that involve numerous difficult decisions on both sides - from border demarcation to the future of regional infrastructure projects such as the Zangezur Corridor. On April 19, 2024, Armenia agreed to return four abandoned border villages to Azerbaijan as an initial step in border delimitation.
Russia officially became a nationalist state in the summer of 2020, when the constitution was amended to declare Russian the state language as “the language of the state-forming people”. That same summer saw the birth of the “Russian Community”. It has since grown into the most numerous and influential nationalist and “protectionist” movement, displacing both the neo-Nazis and the Cossacks.
Since Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in February 2009, the intensification of Israel’s foreign policy toward Russia has been evident across nearly all levels — from intergovernmental and interparliamentary contacts to joint commissions on trade, economic and cultural cooperation.
All territorial conflicts of the former USSR, without exception, employ arguments based on Soviet bureaucracy and documents from the USSR authorities. The conflict around the exclave of Vorukh clearly shows that these documents cannot be considered as arguments. The communist leaders were interested in concealing disputes, not in resolving them.
Chechens (Nokhchi) and Ingush (Galgai) are two closely related peoples. Not only are they neighbors: they share religion (Sufi Sunnism), tribal (teip) social structure, traditions, mutually intelligible languages, and historical fate: both peoples were subject to deportation in 1944. The prerequisites for the territorial dispute were laid with the redrawing of the borders of the restored autonomy after the return of the Vainakhs from deportation.
The April issue of our monitoring turned out to have a certain bias towards historical themes. We did not plan this initially, but researchers are increasingly turning to historicism and the historical method as a reliable support in the rapidly changing, fragmented flow of events. The political process – both global and in the countries of the former USSR – has noticeably accelerated in recent months, and it is possible to correspond to these changes only with clear guidelines in the historical field.
In April 2025, the materials published by the PSCRP program covered a wide range of post-Soviet subregions, from Estonia to Central Asia.