The foreign minister of Vietnam paid a two-day visit to Moscow this week, marking another step in recent efforts by the two countries to improve bilateral relations, but apparently producing few if any significant results. Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien arrived in Moscow on June... MORE

Russia's State Duma yesterday passed in its first reading the draft law "On making changes in and additions to the federal law 'On licensing individual types of activities.'" The bill, which required 226 votes for passage, was passed 292 to 104, with two abstentions. According... MORE

Ivan Grachev, a State Duma deputy who chairs its commission on mortgage financing and also heads the private group "Development of Enterprise," wrote in a newspaper this week that the "debureaucratization" measures the government is pushing fall short in a number of ways. He says... MORE

Some observers say that the Kremlin's power in Chechnya has weakened to such a degree that even the few Chechens who oppose the republic's separatists have started to reject cooperation with Moscow (see the Monitor, June 7). This observation received fresh confirmation yesterday from Akhmad... MORE

Outside the formal framework of the CIS or on its fringes, "integration" efforts are being energized more and more by traditional forms of Russian nationalism and pan-Slavism. Three primary political factors seem to account for this growing trend. First, the proven ineffectiveness of the CIS... MORE

Three days of talks in Moscow this week between Indian Foreign and Defense Minister Jaswant Singh and top Russian leaders appears to have greatly bolstered a "strategic partnership" agreement between the two countries that was signed during a visit last fall by President Vladimir Putin... MORE

Singh's visit to Moscow appeared also to bring the two countries closer together on the issue of U.S. missile defense plans, though published reports exhibited some disagreement as to the basis on which this result was achieved. This ambiguity was perhaps unavoidable, given the mixed... MORE

On June 4, Russian General Gennady Troshev, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, called for public hangings of Chechen rebels. A few days earlier, he had said that he backed the idea of giving rewards for information leading to their capture (Russian agencies, June... MORE

The body of Lem Idrisov, head of the administration of the village of Gekhi-Chu, was discovered on the evening of June 5 near a burned-out Volga automobile. According to police, Idrisov was the victim of a rocket-propelled grenade attack. Following Idrisov's murder, three local administration... MORE

Amid high-profile talks between Russia and India in Moscow, and in the runup to a series of even more weighty summit meetings that are to take place in the days ahead between Russian President Vladimir Putin and both U.S. President George W. Bush and Chinese... MORE