?If certain members of GUUAM have decided to abandon that five-country group, they are proceeding with decorous discretion. Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova formed the group in 1998, with Uzbekistan joining in April 1999 during a Washington summit. The group aimed mainly to counterbalance the... MORE

members jointly resisted Moscow's attempts to revise the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe in ways that would have allowed Russia to keep ground forces in or near GUUAM countries. That signal achievement of the group remains its sole tangible one to date. Yet the... MORE

.In apparent deference to short-term political and financial considerations, the Georgian government is delaying progress on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (Turkey) oil export pipeline project. The other participants are Azerbaijan, Turkey, the international consortium of oil producers AIOC--Azerbaijan International Operating Company, led by British Petroleum Amoco--and the... MORE

The fortnight saw several developments in domestic politics which again showed that the more things change in Russia, the more they remain the same. While Acting President Vladimir Putin vowed to create a "dictatorship of law," in which all Russians would have to obey the... MORE

?What was particularly ironic about the Babitsky case was that after having been denied basic legal rights, such as access to his lawyer, for weeks, the correspondent was freed from a Dagestani jail essentially on the oral orders of an acting head of state and... MORE

The past fortnight saw the continuation of a general warming trend in relations between Russia and the West. But this new spirit of reconciliation, launched by both Moscow and the West in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin's appointment as acting Russian president, was tested by... MORE

The West's efforts to downplay differences with Russia over Chechnya were displayed particularly vividly during the British foreign secretary's visit to Moscow. As Clinton administration officials had done previously, Cook lavished praise on Putin personally and offered a virtual endorsement of his presidential bid. With... MORE

The hegemonial aspirations unveiled by Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, seem to have emboldened the supporters of accession to the Russia-Belarus Union in some of the CIS member countries. Those supporters regard the union as the nucleus of a supranational structure that could, through accretions... MORE

Armenia's Defense Minister, Lieutenant-General Vagharshak Harutiunian, on February 8-10 paid a landmark visit to Belarus during which he and his counterpart, Colonel-General Aleksandr Chumakov, discussed a plan for "strategic and military-technical cooperation" between the two countries in 2000--the first annual plan for military cooperation among... MORE

?Observers of Russian domestic politics over the last fortnight could be forgiven for feeling that the political winds were getting chillier. The detention and subsequent disappearance of Andrei Babitsky, a Radio Liberty correspondent who had been reporting from Chechnya, seemed to be a sign that... MORE