...Back at home, meanwhile, Putin finally began making good on his promise of earlier this year to end Russia's notorious and unloved oligarchs "as a class." The head of state continued to insist that he had no intention of overturning the results of the controversial... MORE

?The most popular explanation for what was going on was that Putin and the KGB veterans whom he had brought into the Kremlin, including Sergei Ivanov, head of the powerful Security Council, were doing what they know best--reasserting state control by repressing independent centers of... MORE

ORT cameraman and Minsk resident Dzmitri Zavadski disappeared without a trace in the Belarusan capital on July 7, and is still unaccounted for as of this writing. Analogies with the Andrei Babitsky affair are widely cited. Zavadski, who is no political figure, became a cause... MORE

On July 14 in Vienna, the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reviewed Russia's performance in complying with OSCE decisions on a partial withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia. Those decisions, taken at the OSCE's summit in Istanbul in... MORE

Kyrgyzstan's Internal Affairs Minister Lieutenant-General Omurbek Kutuev announced on July 10 the arrest in Bishkek of ten "terrorists," said to be members of the Uighur Liberation Front. The group includes citizens of China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey. According to Kutuev, his ministry was forced... MORE

Sections 1-2-3 (Foreign Policy Concept)Unfortunately, the new Foreign Policy Concept appears to share, along with the other two documents, a blurring of priorities and an absence of conciseness which suggests the document was drafted as much to satisfy a host of different constituencies as to... MORE

Moscow's already intense maneuvering on the international stage picked up even more pace over the past fortnight, as the Kremlin began to shift the focus of its diplomatic activity from the West to the East. Thus, late May and the month of June were noteworthy... MORE

From June 19 to July 1, Ukraine hosted the largest exercise ever conducted by NATO forces in a post-Soviet country. The naval, air and amphibious exercise Cooperative Partner-2000, in the framework of NATO's Enhanced Partnership for Peace program, brought together forces from ten NATO member... MORE

From June 16 to June 21, Georgia hosted for the first time a joint exercise with troops of a NATO country. Some sixty U.S. Army medical personnel and 100 Georgian counterparts practiced battlefield medical treatment at a Georgian military base. The U.S.-financed exercise was designed... MORE

On June 28, Russian President Vladimir Putin elevated Vyacheslav Trubnikov to a specially created post as overseer of Moscow's CIS policy. Trubnikov will be First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, with the title of Federal Minister, full cabinet rank, and the mandate of presidential envoy... MORE