George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who has spent more than US$100 million supporting Russia's impoverished scientists, has denounced a recent order from the Russian Academy of Sciences' leadership that its members report their contacts with foreigners to the authorities. The academy's governing presidium recently... MORE

Residents of Primorsky Krai in Russia's Far East, who just a few short months ago were suffering as a result of power outages, have found themselves in the dark again. The power was out in a number of the region's cities yesterday: Dalenergo, the regional... MORE

The CIS summit just held in Minsk has highlighted two Red flashpoints on the western fringe of the CIS, along the line of contact with Europe. One of them, Belarus, is a case of Soviet continuity by authoritarian presidential regime. The other, Moldova, has freely... MORE

On May 29, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma signed a decree assigning the position of state secretaries to government ministries. If not banned by the Constitutional Court, this will boost presidential control over the cabinet of ministers and effectively make ministers puppets of the presidential office.... MORE

Reporting on last week's UN Security Council decision to extend by one month the Iraq "oil-for-food" program has been divided over whether the decision represented a victory or a defeat for U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell--and whether, by extension, it may also mark an... MORE

The identity of the two finalists who will compete in the second round of the gubernatorial election in Primorsky Krai on June 17 was finally settled this week. The results of the first round ran counter to the Kremlin's wishes, and the subsequent attempt to... MORE

Sverdlovsk Oblast Governor Eduard Rossel was right when he predicted that the amendment cutting from sixty-nine to nine the number of incumbent governors allowed to run for a third term (the so-called "Nadezhdin amendment") would not be the end of the story. On May 30,... MORE

Using his trademark method of dealing with subgroups of CIS countries (see the Monitor, June 4), Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting of what he terms "the Caucasus Four" on the sidelines of the June 1 CIS summit in Minsk. Even that subgroup he... MORE

The Collective Security Treaty summit in Yerevan on May 25 and the CIS-wide summit in Minsk on June 1 determined that the CIS Antiterrorism Center (ATC) does not operate and can barely be said to exist. The secretaries of the member countries' security councils, meeting... MORE

Former Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) members Sergei Yushenkov and Vladimir Golovlyov announced last week that a new democratic opposition group they are setting up will receive funding from Boris Berezovsky. Yushenkov and Golovlyov, who are both State Duma deputies, formally announced that they were... MORE