Amidst strained relations between Armenia and Russia, Russia's state atomic energy company will modernize Armenia's nuclear power plant and presumably build a new unit.
Discontent simmers while Georgian Manganese, the leading exporter of ferroalloys and manganese ores, says it is unable to sell what used to be the country's key export product.
The region's already meager electricity generation capacity is in jeopardy, and an "environmental disaster" could be at hand, the local de facto authorities say.
In the years before independence, Stepnogorsk had become a key node in Moscow’s biological weapons program and uranium industry. Now it is one of many Kazakh provincial towns framed by its Soviet legacy.
Vakhtang (Buba) Kikabidze, a Georgian singer and actor universally loved across the former Soviet Union, has died at the age of 84, drawing the curtain on an era.