The bodies of seventeen Chechens were discovered on April 10 in the basement of a police building in Djohar's [Grozny's] Oktyabrskoe district. The victims, who were reportedly middle-aged males and have not yet been identified, were apparently killed some six months ago. Djohar Mayor Bislan... MORE

Interviewed in the current issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel, Finland's President Tarja Halonen advises against the admission of the Baltic states to NATO. Halonen's position is a classic case of "Russia First" as it applied specifically to Central Europe during the Cold War... MORE

The Russian government has had little to say over the past ten days on the subject either of the April 1 collision between a U.S. Navy surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter or of the continuing diplomatic standoff between the two countries that has resulted.... MORE

Russian voters went to the polls on April 8 in Amur and Tula Oblasts and the Evenk Autonomous District to choose new governors (Russian agencies, April 9). The result in Amur brought the biggest surprise. There, incumbent Governor Anatoly Belonogov had been widely tipped to... MORE

From April 2 to 7, joint military bodies of the CIS in Moscow held two exercises in parallel: one for conventional ground forces relevant to Central Asia, and one for air defense forces along the perimeter of the former Soviet Union. The conventional force exercise,... MORE

The headquarters of Russia's air defense forces, which doubles as the CIS Joint Air Defense System's headquarters, also hosted a CIS-wide exercise from April 2 to April 7. Russian Air Force Commander in Chief General Anatoly Kornukov supervised the exercise from that headquarters, which is... MORE

The April 2 release of ardent oppositionist and former Deputy Premier for Fuel and Energy Yulia Tymoshenko (see the Monitor, April 3) has seemingly consolidated Ukraine's antipresidential protesters. The National Salvation Forum (NSF), which Tymoshenko had co-founded before her arrest in February, has approved her... MORE

Lawyers for Pavel Borodin, the Russia-Belarus union state secretary and former Kremlin property manager, have asked the Swiss authorities that he be released on bail. Borodin, who was arrested in January at New York's JFK International Airport on a Swiss warrant and placed in a... MORE

Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed yesterday that one of NTV television's shareholders had received US$1.5 billion "in a dishonest way" and that some of the embattled television channel's staff had recently received US$6.6 million through "gray schemes" of questionable legality. While Putin--who made his comments... MORE

At the same time, members of NTV's team of journalists, which initially maintained solidarity in denouncing the Gazprom takeover as illegal and vowing to resist it, continued to jump ship yesterday, with political reporter Aleksei Pivovarov and news anchor Natalya Zabuzova announcing their resignations. On... MORE