Russia's chief military prosecutor said yesterday that crime is growing among Russian military officers and that 100 officers of colonel rank and above--including 15 admirals and generals -- are among those being investigated. According to Col. Gen. Valentin Panichev, prosecutors have launched legal actions aimed... MORE

Turkmen president Saparmurad Niazov and Russian leaders attempted to resolve extant differences during Niazov's "working visit" to Moscow on October 14 and 15. A Turkmen official told The Monitor that Niazov's meeting with Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the Barvikha sanatorium was a mere courtesy... MORE

Russian ambassador Aleksandr Papkin yesterday urged Moldova promptly to sign the Memorandum on the principles of settling the Transdniester conflict, initialed by President Mircea Snegur and Transdniester leader Igor Smirnov last June but repudiated afterward by Snegur. Failure to sign the Memorandum, together with claims... MORE

Like the old paratrooper he is, Security Council Secretary Aleksandr Lebed is boiling mad at what he sees as a plot to do away with the airborne troops. Yesterday he blasted a recent order from Defense Minister Igor Rodionov to disband 2 of Russia's remaining... MORE

U.S. secretary of defense William Perry is unlikely to find too many sympathetic faces when he urges members of several Duma committees this week to ratify the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II (START II). With NATO expansion into Eastern Europe imminent, Russian conventional military power... MORE

Nothing was decided at yesterday's parliamentary hearings. But Lebed waved around pages of a draft law on establishing a free economic zone in Chechnya. This proposal, believed to be the brainchild of Sergei Shakhrai, is being seen as a possible compromise that might allow Russian... MORE

Tokyo has protested the October 12 seizure of a Japanese fishing boat by Russian border forces. The 10-ton trawler, with a crew of five men, was fishing in waters off the disputed Kuril Islands. It was the first seizure of a Japanese boat by Russian... MORE

Following talks in Moscow yesterday with Venezuelan foreign minister Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas, Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov reiterated Moscow's intention to help Cuba complete the Juragua nuclear power plant. The U.S. has opposed construction of the plant on the grounds that it is a... MORE

Russia has accumulated 650 million cubic meters of radioactive waste, Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Nikolai Yegorov told a Moscow conference on Tuesday. The Navy and the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in Chelyabinsk are the main sources. While 90 billion rubles have been earmarked for research... MORE

Closed hearings on Chechnya were held yesterday by a joint session of the two houses of the Russian parliament. Alarmed by the open feuding in his government, President Yeltsin ordered Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, National Security Adviser Aleksandr Lebed, and Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov to... MORE