?Only two days after the finish of the Russian-U.S. summit, Presidents Bush and Putin proceeded on to Italy, where they participated in yet another high-level meeting of potentially historic significance. The May 28 Russia-NATO summit, hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and held just... MORE

President Bush, who as a candidate strongly criticized the Putin administration for repression in Chechnya and putting pressure on Russia's beleaguered nonstate state media, did raise the issues of human rights and democracy during his Moscow visit. But he did it only sotto voce--during a... MORE

?During the late the 1990s, the Republican opposition had also strongly criticized the Clinton administration for its coziness with Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin and for having ignored massive corruption and the emergence of a rapacious oligarchic elite in post-Soviet Russia. Those issues now have a quaint... MORE

During the May 24 Russian-U.S. summit, Presidents Bush and Putin also considered the problems of the post-Soviet area, in the context of both U.S.-Russia relations and the antiterrorism campaign. The two presidents' Joint Declaration on the New Strategic Relationship and Joint Statement on Counterterrorism Cooperation... MORE

On May 28 in Rome, an unprecedented summit of NATO's nineteen member countries and Russia launched a NATO-Russia Council (NRC), the first institutional expression of a growing political rapprochement. Russia receives some carefully regulated decisionmaking powers within that body, which has somewhat misleadingly been dubbed... MORE

The United States and Russia announced unexpectedly on May 13 that Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin would indeed have an arms control agreement to sign when the two hold summit talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg later this month. The hastiness of the... MORE

On May 14, only a day after Russia and the United States announced their potentially historic agreement on the strategic arms reduction accord, foreign ministers from Russia and NATO countries meeting in Iceland said that they had clinched a cooperation agreement of equal magnitude. In... MORE

The celebration of Victory Day, this year marking the 52nd anniversary of the triumph over Nazi Germany, was marred by a horrendous act of terrorism in Russia's North Caucasus region. A powerful bomb went off on May 9 in the town of Kaspiisk, on Dagestan's... MORE

"Whatever the case, the Kaspiisk bombing came on the heels of fresh Russian claims of victories against the Chechen rebels, over and above Khattab's reported assassination. Top Russian officials variously claimed to have information that Khattab's comrade-in-arms, Shamil Basaev, had also been killed; that three... MORE

On May 9, the Latvian parliament amended the country's electoral legislation, eliminating the requirements of Latvian language proficiency for candidates in parliamentary and local elections. In practice, this means that Russophones with poor or no knowledge of the Latvian language will be able to run... MORE