Indian Vice Admiral Arun Prakash's statements yesterday give further credence to earlier reports that the long and difficult negotiations between Russia and India which preceded the signing of the recent defense deals were caused at least in part by confusion and a lack of professionalism... MORE

NTV journalists and the channel's ousted general director, Yevgeny Kiselev, reached an agreement yesterday with Alfred Kokh to set up a negotiating commission to try and find a compromise solution to their dispute. Kokh is the head of Gazprom-Media who was named head of NTV's... MORE

At the same time, Kiselev and the NTV journalists, who had been broadcasting only news and information round-the-clock as a sign of protest against the takeover, decided yesterday to resume regular broadcasting. The decision coincided with warnings from the Press Ministry that NTV, by abandoning... MORE

On April 5, Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky gave a speech in Strasbourg to one of the Council of Europe's largest factions--the Party of People's Democrats. Babitsky is unquestionably one of the world's best-informed experts on Chechnya's realities. His opinion on how the Chechen crisis... MORE

The leaders of Russia and Belarus celebrated this week the fifth anniversary of the founding act of union. That hastily cobbled document was signed by Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Alyaksandr Lukashenka on April 1, 1996, and purported to create a confederation under the acronym "SSR."... MORE

Belarusan President Alyaksandr Lukashenka does not seem likely to bow too readily to Moscow's terms for a unified state. He has spent the past five years setting preconditions to unification which are difficult for Moscow to meet. Some of these came to light again both... MORE

The state-of-the-nation speech President Vladimir Putin delivered on April 3 was noticeably short on foreign policy matters, but appears nevertheless to have fueled further speculation that an important shift may be taking place in the Kremlin's posture toward the outside world. Indeed, perhaps the most... MORE

CNN founder Ted Turner confirmed yesterday that he had reached a deal to "buy out" Vladimir Gusinsky, founder of Media-Most and its embattled television channel, NTV. Turner was quoted as saying that he had reached an agreement with Gusinsky and was working on an agreement... MORE

On April 4, Moldova became the first post-communist country to elect an active communist as president. Vladimir Voronin, first secretary of Moldova's Party of Communists, was voted in as head of state by the parliament with seventy-one votes in his favor, out of the total... MORE

In what appears to be part of a stepped-up Moscow effort to increase its influence in the Persian Gulf, the Russian Foreign Ministry yesterday released a statement urging the United Nations to make a commitment to lifting sanctions against Baghdad if weapons inspections produce no... MORE