The outspoken governor of Russia's Far Eastern Primorsky Krai backpedaled April 12 from his claim one day earlier that Boris Yeltsin had called for suspension of the demarcation operation on the Chinese-Russian border. (See Monitor, April 12) Yevgeny Nazdratenko's U-turn came as Russian Foreign Ministry... MORE

Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin told a Moscow briefing that the Kremlin's demand for exclusive basing rights in Sevastopol stems from the Russian "view of Sevastopol on a par with Moscow, Leningrad, and Volgograd [Stalingrad]. Too much Russian blood has been spilled for these cities."... MORE

Echoing the "power ministries" (see Monitor, April 12) President Boris Yeltsin's political aide Georgy Satarov yesterday questioned the proposed mediated negotiations with Chechen president Djohar Dudaev. Satarov accused Dudaev of unwillingness to negotiate and called for negotiations with other, unidentified "sober-minded" Chechens. Satarov also required... MORE

Kazakhstan's industry and trade minister Harry Steuck announced yesterday that the government is preparing a merger of four large nonferrous metallurgical plants into a single company prior to inviting Western companies to take over the new conglomerate. The four are the Zyryan lead plant, the... MORE

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Demurin told a Moscow briefing yesterday that Russia deems "any economic blockade of Abkhazia out of the question," and that its Federal Border Service neither was nor will be ordered to enforce the sanctions declared against Abkhazia at the last... MORE

The intergovernmental Executive Committee (IK) of the Russia-Belarus Community of Sovereign States (SSR) held its inaugural session in Moscow yesterday. Chaired by Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the session adopted the IK's first policy resolutions. They stipulated equal entitlements for Russian and Belarus citizens to... MORE

The International Monetary Fund is expected to loan Ukraine $900 million to bridge the gap that arose at the beginning of this week when the Fund announced that it would not restart a $1.6 billion standby loan that it suspended in January. Until this week,... MORE

European Parliament Chairman Klaus Haensch stressed April 10 and 11 in Vilnius and Riga that the European Union will admit the Baltic states as a group, not individually. Haensch outlined a sequence of steps involving a common beginning of the admission procedure for all three... MORE

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Moscow yesterday that Russia would not abandon its military cooperation with North Korea, despite Pyongyang's recent renunciation of the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and its three subsequent military incursions into the demilitarized border region. "We base... MORE

A smoldering disagreement over marking the Russian-Chinese border (See Monitor, April 8) erupted publicly yesterday when Boris Yeltsin was forced to deny a statement by a powerful regional leader to the effect that Yeltsin had ordered a suspension in the demarcation operation. Yevgeny Nazdratenko, governor... MORE