In response to Gazprom's ouster of NTV management yesterday, journalists and other staff members of NTV television, the flagship channel of Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-Most group, have begun what Yevgeny Kiselev, the channel's erstwhile general director and host of its Itogi news analysis program, called acts... MORE

The positive atmospherics generated by the Moscow meeting of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Valdas Adamkus transcend bilateral Russian-Lithuanian relations. The March 29-30 event in Moscow marked the second, and almost certainly not last round, of a Putin-style charm offensive, which he had launched in February... MORE

While Russian and international news sources have focused in recent days on the spate of appointments President Vladimir Putin made to key defense and security posts, there has been less attention devoted to another Kremlin reform effort within the defense sector which could ultimately prove... MORE

Leading human rights organization have called for an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya. According to Amnesty International, men, women and children have been the victims of violence and torture in Chechnya's prisons, and more than 1,000 people who... MORE

Positive atmospherics were the main goal and may be considered the main achievement of the Moscow meeting between Presidents Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Putin's go-ahead for the March 29-31 visit--coming only six weeks after his ice-thawing talks on neutral territory... MORE

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma is apparently bowing under the pressure of a growing opposition to his rule in the wake of the audiotape scandal (see the Monitor, December 13, 2000, February 12). He seems to have grown accustomed to the inevitability of talks with the... MORE

Amid the accusations and recriminations which have accompanied the latest spy row between Russia and the United States, news media have given relatively little attention to a pair of other diplomatic confrontations--one actual and one potential--which have arisen as a result of Russia's foreign intelligence... MORE

The coming week could prove decisive for NTV, the television channel belonging to Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-Most holding: Its main creditor, the 38-percent state-owned Gazprom natural gas monopoly, is poised to convene a shareholders' meeting tomorrow (April 3) at which it may succeed in taking over... MORE

On March 29, a top panel of Karabakh's supreme court (lower-case supreme court) upheld the February 26 verdicts and sentences of a lower panel of that same court in the trial of the former strongman of Karabakh, Samvel Babaian, and four codefendants. Babaian was sentenced... MORE

CIS Collective Security Council (CSC) Secretary Valery Nikolayenko visited Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on March 28-31 to drum up support for a Central Asian "regional security system" with its "collective security forces." The Russian diplomat Nikolayenko, a former ambassador to Kazakhstan, heads the Moscow-based and... MORE