Last week, only several days after two defectors from the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS), Sergei Yushenkov and Vladimir Golovlyov, announced that Boris Berezovsky had promised funding for their planned new democratic opposition group, the tycoon himself made what can only be called a surprise... MORE

The CIS summit, held on May 31-June 1 in Minsk, served as stark evidence of the Kremlin's effort to lend this amorphous grouping a centrally manageable shape. Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided from his first days in that office not simply to accept the... MORE

The Minsk summit officially terminated the CIS Customs Union (CU) and replaced it with the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC). The member countries are the same: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The EAEC is the fourth CIS project of this type, after the CIS-wide Economic... MORE

While many transition economies have reported a few years of economic growth, only a handful have enjoyed sustained growth in living standards accompanied by fundamental changes in companies. Financial crises and banking collapses, similar to developments in Russia in August 1998, have often kept short-term... MORE

A similar process can be seen on the household side. Bank loans to private individuals at the end of the first quarter had grown to 177 million lats (US$281 million), up 59 percent from a year earlier. Mortgage lending--which was nonexistent a few years ago--grew... MORE

A senior Russian diplomat said yesterday that a visit to Moscow by Indian Foreign and Defense Minister Jaswant Singh, scheduled to start on June 3, is to focus on Russian-Indian military-technical cooperation--that is, Russian arms sales to New Delhi. The statement underscored once again the... MORE

From May 27 to 31, NATO's Parliamentary Assembly held a landmark session in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius. Concurrently, the North Atlantic Council met at the level of foreign affairs ministers of the allied and aspirant countries on May 29-30 in Budapest, Hungary. The two events and... MORE

A month after the ouster of Ukraine's liberal Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko from power, the country now has a replacement. Anatoly Kinakh, 46, chairman of the Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (UUIE), having been nominated by President Leonid Kuchma, was voted into office by... MORE

Ukrainian politics, which have been consumed by the sensational "Kuchmagate" scandal and the dismissal of the Yushchenko government, have overshadowed the good news about Ukraine's continuing economic expansion. Following the 6 percent growth in GDP reported for 2000, the expansion has apparently accelerated this year,... MORE

Despite its dismissal by the Verkhovna Rada on April 25, Acting Prime Minister Victor Yushchenko's caretaker cabinet managed to mind the macroeconomic store in Kyiv. The cabinet wanted to ensure that the progress made in straightening out Ukraine's economic problems during the last two years... MORE