A series of terrorist acts that took place in late March and early April of this year in Uzbekistan took the lives of twenty-eight people. Sixteen terrorists were also killed in shootouts, and fifteen militants blew themselves up while detonating improvised explosive devices. Approximately fifty... MORE

On April 21, Russia used its veto power - for the first time in ten years - to block a draft UN Security Council resolution on Cyprus. A British- and U.S.-sponsored resolution would have guaranteed the security of Greek and Turkish Cypriots if they accepted... MORE

The head of the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, Valentina Melnikova, told Ekho Moskvy on May 4 that her organization estimates that about 25,000 Russian soldiers and policemen have been killed in Chechnya since 1994, when Moscow launched its first military campaign in the... MORE

A conflict between Georgia's federal government in Tbilisi and the leadership of the renegade republic of Ajaria has reached a dangerous point over the past two days. On May 2, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili demanded that Ajaria's strongman, Aslan Abashidze, disarm his "illegal units" within... MORE

Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of pro-Moscow Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and the head of his father's presidential security service, told Interfax on May 3 that Aslan Maskhadov may be among a group of fighters surrounded by federal forces in Chechnya's Kurchaloev district and that the... MORE

In his annual address to the national parliament on April 30, Tajik President Imomali Rahmonov said that close strategic relations bind Russia and Tajikistan together. "Tajikistan has not changed its attitude towards its strategic ally over the ten years of our partnership. The Tajik nation... MORE

On the morning of Wednesday, April 28, the former head of Russia's Federal Bankruptcy Service, Georgy Tal, was shot on the street outside his office in downtown Moscow. The 48-year-old Tal headed the Federal Bankruptcy Service from January 1998 to February 2001, and helped write... MORE

On April 29, representatives of a recently-formed youth movement filed documents with the Moscow City Election Commission to register an initiative group whose aim would be drumming up support for holding a national referendum on whether to extend the presidential term from four to ten... MORE

In the mid-1980s then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made the building of a "common European home" the central plank in a radical new foreign policy initiative aimed at drawing Western European governments closer to Moscow while simultaneously undermining the NATO alliance and broader ties between... MORE

The end of April saw a ratcheting up of tensions between Russia and Latvia. This happened despite the fact that Russia and the EU agreed on April 27 to extend their Partnership and Cooperation Agreement to the ten new EU member states (see previous article).... MORE