More antipresidential violence broke out in Kyiv on March 9, the anniversary of the birth of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. While recent protests, which include the mass demonstrations of late February, are hardly a revolution in the making, the aggressive mood of the... MORE

The Unity Party's political council is set to meet today to decide whether its faction in the State Duma will back a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government. The initiative was launched last month by the Communist Party of the Russian... MORE

Two Chechen rebel field commanders, Ruslan Akhmadov and Badrudi Mutrazaev, were captured in Baku, Azerbaijan on March 11 and handed over to representatives of Russia's Interior Ministry. Akhmadov was a close assistant to Arbi Baraev, considered to one of the main hostage-taking "specialists" in Chechnya,... MORE

Until very recently, Armenia's relations with NATO were almost nonexistent, having been circumscribed to episodic bilateral military cooperation with Greece, a NATO country which official Yerevan found palatable because of a shared history of conflict with Turkey. In spite of the stated principle of complementarity... MORE

Even before the recent parliamentary elections, Moldova's system of government had all but disintegrated on both institutional and political levels. It is precisely this collapse which made the Communist Party's triumphant return to power in the February 25 elections possible. Its share of power in... MORE

A top Iranian energy official, speaking on Iranian state television only days before a high-profile visit by President Mohammad Khatami to Moscow, has unexpectedly criticized Russia for delays in completing the controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant. The remarks, which come amid a general dampening of... MORE

The major political development of the last week was the move by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) to call a vote of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. This raised the possibility that parliament might be dissolved. The... MORE

On March 6 in Moscow, a session of the CIS Collective Security Secretariat called for "soonest possible" measures to: (1) station "collective rapid-deployment troops in Central Asia," (2) complete a legal framework for the stationing of "collective security forces" in Central Asian countries and the... MORE

On March 9, the Military Court of Kyrgyzstan upheld the Bishkek city military court's January 22 sentence on Feliks Kulov, who is generally considered the strongest political rival to President Askar Akaev. Kulov has been sentenced to seven years in prison for abuse of power... MORE

In a commentary published by the Russian daily Kommersant on February 22, two of the newspaper's military correspondents quoted unnamed sources as saying that President Vladimir Putin was on the verge of launching a major personnel shake-up within the military leadership. Putin would sign the... MORE