Russia's recently appointed minister of defense industries said June 9 that, despite the many difficulties they have faced since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia's defense industrialists support the continuation of economic reform. In an obvious suggestion that enterprise leaders in this sector would... MORE

Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrosian told a congress of his ruling Armenian All-National Movement that Armenia can not accept a rigid application of the principles of the territorial integrity of states as the basis for settling the Karabakh conflict. A solution proceeding from those principles "could... MORE

Russia's foreign minister yesterday returned to a harder line on NATO enlargement. Yevgeny Primakov warned that a failure by Moscow and NATO to reach a compromise agreement on enlargement would lead Russia both to rethink its own military development plans and to reconsider its adherence... MORE

During a trip to Iran over the weekend, Russian deputy foreign minister Viktor Posuvalyuk emphasized Moscow's intentions to strengthen both economic and political ties with Teheran. In remarks clearly aimed at exploiting differences between Iran and the U.S., Posuvalyuk said that Russia wants to see... MORE

Speaking to journalists yesterday, Yeltsin's political aide Georgy Satarov repeated his earlier allegations that the Russian Communist party plans to monitor the elections so as to compile its own, alternative" election results. If the official authorities declare a Yeltsin victory, Satarov alleged, the Communists will... MORE

The Russian Central Bank says it will appeal all the way to the Constitutional Court against an order to transfer five trillion rubles (nearly $1 billion) from its profits to the federal government. The order was pushed through parliament last week by President Yeltsin, who... MORE

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Yeltsin continued his vote-pandering generosity. In Novosibirsk yesterday, he announced that he would pay off a 50 billion ruble ($10 million) debt owed for building Novosibirsk's metro system. (Reuters, June 10) Meanwhile, Yeltsin's economic aide Aleksandr Livshits alleged that "red... MORE

The Belarus State Committee on the Press announced yesterday the suspension of a Brest regional newspaper for unspecified offenses against the press law. The Committee also said that it had suspended the Belarusskaya delovaya gazeta (see Monitor, June 10) because the paper had "divulged state... MORE

In separate but convergent statements yesterday, the foreign ministers of Estonia and Latvia called for additional security guarantees to their countries in order to compensate for higher Russian force levels in the nearby Pskov region. Both ministers said that they were in contact with the... MORE

Elements of Estonia's nascent army, paramilitary Defense League, and police conducted a three-day exercise in Tapa, 80 kilometers east of Tallinn, in which they practiced the defense of urban areas. The theme of the exercise was coping with unrest provoked by a neighboring country. The... MORE