A former employee of President Viktor Yushchenko’s secretariat has claimed that Yushchenko agreed to back the frontrunner, Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych in the run-up to the January 17 presidential election. Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych denied this, but Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, against whom... MORE

On January 1 Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev said that the country will advance security as the chair of the OSCE in the “area from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” Kazakhstan’s government has suggested holding an informal OSCE meeting of foreign ministers in Astana in mid 2010,... MORE

On December 25, 2009 UNIAN published a secret agreement “On Political Reconciliation and the Development of Ukraine” leaked by Yaroslav Kozachok, the deputy head of the presidential secretariat’s department on domestic affairs and regional development. Kozachok resigned in protest at the secret agreement between President... MORE

On December 22, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s representative in southern Russia, Vladimir Ustinov, gave his annual speech on growing security threats in the North Caucasus, addressed to the Federation Council in Moscow. In listing the most dangerous threats to the security of the Russian Federation,... MORE

Effective January 1, Russia has drastically reduced its traditional subsidy to the oil processing industry in Belarus and, thereby, to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s government. That industry in Belarus is processing Russian crude oil and exporting the derivatives to European Union markets. Some Russian oil producing... MORE

In December Ukrainian officials descended on Washington with one overriding mission –to convince the Obama administration that without the financial help of the IMF, Ukraine might be unable to supply the EU with Russian gas this winter. This badly disguised attempt at blackmail on the... MORE

On December 17, Ingushetia’s President Yunus-bek Yevkurov and the head of North Ossetia, Taimuraz Mamsurov, signed an agreement on developing good-neighborly relations between the two republics. The agreement stipulates a plan of joint actions for the republican governments and government controlled civil organizations in 2010.... MORE

On December 22 in Ashgabat, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his counterpart in Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov witnessed the signing of documents on the bilateral gas trade and transportation. The documents mark the end of Russia’s punitive, nine-month halt of gas imports from Turkmenistan. The halt... MORE

Last year was for Russia both extraordinarily hard and very unlucky –but it saw strikingly little economic reforms and practically no political development. Opinion polls show that a significant majority of Russians (62 percent) consider it as worse than 2008, when the arrival of the... MORE

December 11 marked the anniversary of the beginning of the first Chechen War. It was then, in December 1994, that President Boris Yeltsin decided to militarily force the Chechen people to abandon the idea of independence. As is known, the Russian army lost that war... MORE