Although details were scanty, presidential candidate Boris Yeltsin reportedly won the political support of defense chiefs from Russia's military industrial complex who gathered yesterday at the Energomash rocket engine plant. In return for a promise of state support for defense enterprises in domestic and foreign... MORE

Russia's "power" ministries yesterday and this morning took steps damaging to president Boris Yeltsin's announced peace initiative. They stormed Dargo, bombed and rocketed Goiskoe, announced that they had earmarked the forces to be "permanently stationed" in Chechnya after "peace" is declared, and made public a... MORE

President Eduard Shevardnadze yesterday told the Georgian parliament that Russia is "the main factor" affecting efforts to reach a political settlement in Abkhazia and that Georgia is consequently prepared to host Russian military bases in order to resolve the Abkhaz problem. Barring a constructive Russian... MORE

Moldovan defense minister Lt. General Pavel Creanga was able yesterday to symbolically reenter the Defense Ministry under a decree by President Mircea Snegur which reinstated Creanga but deprived him of most powers. By his "Order No. 4" as "direct commander" of the armed forces, Snegur... MORE

The Russian Duma yesterday adopted by a vote of 285 to 5 a resolution criticizing as "inappropriate and biased" most CIS member countries' reactions to its March 15 resolution which invalidated the dissolution of the USSR. Yesterday's resolution singled out for criticism statements issued by... MORE

The chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's planning and mobilization directorate said April 9 that more than 200,000 draftees are expected to enter the Russian armed forces this spring, raising manning levels to 85 percent of statutory strength. Although Lt. General Vyacheslav Zherebtsov complained of... MORE

In a speech to the Russian Security Council yesterday, President Boris Yeltsin outlined an ambitious series of activities aimed at improving Russian nuclear safety and security that he said Moscow would present to world leaders during the April 19-20 nuclear security summit. Among the steps... MORE

Remarks by a Foreign Ministry spokesman April 9, and by Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov April 5, suggest that Moscow may begin to make more explicit its long-developing strategy of trying to force NATO to choose between two policies that the alliance seeks to combine: enlargement... MORE

The announcement, made April 9 by Aleksandr Kazakov, head of the State Privatization Committee, that the government is likely to try to buy back from leading Russian banks the blocks of shares in oil companies that were sold in last autumn's controversial "shares for loans"... MORE

Attending yesterday the first working session of the state commission on the Chechnya settlement, chaired by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, President Boris Yeltsin described its powers as coordinating the settlement plan, defining the plan's "stages and sequence of their implementation, "interacting" with numerous state and... MORE