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

On April 28 the Ukrainian contingent in Iraq lost an additional two soldiers, bringing its total to three. These most recent deaths followed the kidnapping of five Ukrainian citizens working for the Russian company Interenergoservis in Baghdad. Some 1,700 Ukrainian troops are based in the... MORE

On April 12, in the Isfara region in the north of Tajikistan, the special services detained twenty people suspected of committing a range of aggravated criminal acts motivated by racial and religious hatred. These acts included both the murder of the leader of the local... MORE