Russian defense minister Pavel Grachev said yesterday that the 201st Motorized Division, the backbone of Russian "peacekeeping" forces in Tajikistan, will not intervene in the fighting inside Tajikistan, but will guard and defend key government installations and may assist Russia's border troops in fighting Tajik... MORE

Aspirant members of the "Third Force" electoral coalition admitted yesterday that their attempts to unite behind a single candidate in the Russian presidential elections have failed. In the final analysis, none of the three alliance members -- Grigory Yavlinsky, Aleksandr Lebed, and Svyatoslav Fedorov --... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin told Russian Television yesterday that he remains confident that it will be possible to forge a united coalition of reformists prior to the presidential election. (RTR, May 13) Last weekend, Grigory Yavlinsky dismissed Yeltsin's claim that such a coalition was in the... MORE

The head of the OSCE's mission in Grozny, Tim Guldimann, was reported yesterday to have held talks with Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in Moscow and then to have flown back to Chechnya for confidential meetings with Chechen leaders in the mountains. After the latter... MORE

Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko yesterday urged "the most intense possible government control over the country's industry" while visiting a Soviet-era, now ailing electronics plant in Minsk. Lukashenko also announced plans to raise customs duties on imported television sets and radio equipment in order to protect... MORE

An unnamed Russian Foreign Ministry official said May 12 that Moscow will strongly denounce NATO plans to deploy nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe if it can confirm that NATO secretary general Javier Solana expressed such an intention in remarks made May 9 in Oslo. (Interfax,... MORE

An unnamed Russian diplomat yesterday denied reports that the president of the Seattle-based Medical Export, Inc., had been expelled from Russia. The source said that Richard Dann Oppfelt had actually been warned by Russian authorities that his activities in Kamchatka had exceeded the requirements of... MORE

Guatemalan police reported yesterday that they had captured two suspects in the May 1 shooting of Russian diplomat Yuri Trushkin. (See Monitor, May 6) The evidence implicating the suspects, they said, suggested that the shooting of Trushkin was a common rather than a political crime.... MORE

A top Russian presidential aide accused the media of "stupidity" May 9 for speculating that last week's spy wrangle between Russia and Britain had been cooked up as a campaign ploy by President Boris Yeltsin. Dmitri Ryurikov, Yeltsin's aide on international affairs, said such reports... MORE

Russia's election campaign entered a new phase today. Between now and June 14, when official campaigning ends, each of the eleven officially registered candidates has been assigned equal amounts of free air-time on state-run television -- the ORT, RTR and Petersburg channels -- and on... MORE