Pete Baumgartner is the editor for Central Asia and China for RFE/RL's Central Newsroom in Prague.
The first winner of the Miss Wheelchair World beauty pageant is crying foul after a trendy nightclub in Minsk denied her entry, claiming safety issues.
A Russian court says two Nazi swastikas must go from an inmate's chest, and he's apparently got to do it himself.
Femen's Anzhelina Diash has grabbed headlines with topless protests targeting European presidents. In addition to the jail time, her actions have also lost her a job as a kindergarten teacher.
A multimillion-dollar ski resort in Russia's southern republic of Chechnya had to shell out more money to bring snow for its grand opening this week.
After an uproar over an Akita in a kalpak, some lawmakers want to defend the honor of the traditional Kyrgyz hat by forcing politicians and athletes to wear it.
A major Ukrainian TV station had to distance itself from a New Year's Eve skit that angered activists for its crude depiction of a "Pinocchio" who comes out as transgender.
One of the biggest consumers of alcohol in the world, Belarus is looking at ways to reduce drinking.
Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has called for voters to boycott the presidential election after he was officially barred from being a candidate. Political analyst Nikolai Petrov says that Russian officials are unlikely to harass Navalny, in order to deny the anticorruption activist the publicity he seeks.
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have resolved most of their long-standing border issues. Can they hammer out the last of them by year's end?
Russian athletes are anxiously awaiting a decision by the International Olympic Committee that will determine whether they will compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea or be banned because of an alleged state-run doping system.
A secretive group living in Kyrgyzstan that adheres to a strict interpretation of Islam is in the spotlight once again after the arrest of one of the community’s leaders.
A longtime acquaintance of Uzbek-born Sayfullo Saipov says the man police suspect of killing eight people and injuring 11 others when he plowed a rented pickup truck through a bike lane in New York City on October 31 had verbal run-ins with others in the Uzbek immigrant community and was a "little aggressive."
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov has unveiled Turkmenistan's first golf course -- to a nation that doesn't play the sport and is struggling to make ends meet.
The head of an Uzbek district collapsed and died shortly after he was excoriated by the Andijon regional chief for not harvesting enough cotton.
The Council of Europe's human rights chief told RFE/RL in an interview that Moscow is not cooperating with his office amid reports of rights violations in Chechnya and in Russia-occupied Crimea.
Belarus is shrugging off a series of construction accidents and safety complaints from neighboring countries and European organizations to build its first nuclear power plant near Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.
The freshly concluded world championship of the centuries-old game of kokpar involved 11 countries but was ultimately a showdown between the sport's two fiercest rivals: Kyrgyzstan and host country Kazakhstan.
Forced to compete as "neutral athletes" at the track and field world championships this week, Russians are celebrating any success as a huge victory and, away from the medal podium, national pride is on full display.
What’s next for Mikheil Saakashvili -- the former Georgian president who is now effectively stateless after being stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship?
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![Alyaksandra Chychykava: "Whatever they say about the security issues...in fact, I suspect the reason [for excluding me] is different." (file photo)](https://gdb.rferl.org/4714732c-8642-45bd-8e41-57dc0240856a_cx18_cy20_cw82_w100_r1.jpg)
![Alyaksandra Chychykava: "Whatever they say about the security issues...in fact, I suspect the reason [for excluding me] is different." (file photo)](https://gdb.rferl.org/4714732c-8642-45bd-8e41-57dc0240856a_cx18_cy20_cw82_w66_r1.jpg)
