A second round of talks aimed at boosting trade between Russia and Japan will be held in Tokyo on March 1, Japanese Foreign Ministry officials said yesterday. They added that neither side is likely to raise a proposal made last year by Moscow for joint... MORE

A Chinese official was cited today as stating on Urumqi television that four people were killed and "tens of people" were wounded in two bomb explosions in that city, capital of the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. The attacks, traced to Uighur militants, targeted Urumqi public buses... MORE

Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin says there will soon be important changes in the Russian government. "They will not be merely cosmetic," the prime minister said yesterday. "We are talking about the intensification of market reforms." (NTV, February 25) Chernomyrdin was speaking one day after... MORE

In addition to using Russia's February 23 military holiday to launch a Cold War style verbal attack on the West (see Monitor, February 24), Russian defense minister Igor Rodionov also took the opportunity to assail Defense Council secretary Yuri Baturin. In an inflammatory speech to... MORE

After touring the Northern Caucasian republics of North Ossetia and Dagestan, Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov has promised to step up security along Russia's southern border. Responding to complaints by Dagestan's leaders about frequent incursions by armed gangs from neighboring Chechnya, Kulikov said the border between... MORE

There is as yet no news about the fate of the 55-year-old Italian photographer, Mauro Galligani, who was abducted by unidentified masked men in the center of Djokar-gala on February 23. (Itar-Tass, February 25) Military Reform: The Plot Thickens.

A Moscow daily reports that the director of Russia's Federal Border Service, Gen. Andrei Nikolaev, has submitted his own draft military program to Boris Yeltsin. This means that there are now three military reform programs under consideration in the Kremlin. (Kommersant-daily, February 22) Nikolaev has... MORE

Reappointed as State Security Minister in Transdniester's reshuffled "government," the pseudonymous Maj. Gen. Vadim Shevtsov made public his real identity in an official biography carried by Tiraspol media. He acknowledged that he was in fact Vladimir Antyufeyev, a former senior officer of "Soviet law enforcement... MORE

President Petru Lucinschi's senior adviser, Anatol Taran, stated yesterday that Russia envisages halving its troops in Moldova to 2,500 by the end of 1997. Russian Defense Council secretary Yuri Baturin informed Lucinschi of this plan during an unpublicized stopover in Chisinau last week while visiting... MORE

On the eve of a potentially decisive round of talks with Romania on a good-neighborly relations treaty, Ukrainian foreign minister Hennady Udovenko yesterday urged Bucharest to agree to clauses that would "unambiguously and unreservedly recognize the inviolability of existing borders on land and at sea,... MORE