Against this background, Russian news sources have identified both civilian defense leaders--whose chances to assume the post would presumably improve if the Kremlin chooses the above option--and senior military officers as possible successors to Defense Minister Igor Sergeev. The civilians most frequently named are current... MORE

Control over the Media-Most holding may be on the verge of shifting from its founder and chief, Vladimir Gusinsky, to its main creditor, the 38-percent state-owned company Gazprom, and a consortium of Western investors. Yevgeny Kiselev, general director of NTV, Media-Most's flagship television channel, and... MORE

A court in Brooklyn, New York will today consider an appeal by lawyers for Pavel Borodin, the Russian-Belarus Union state secretary and former Kremlin property manager, that their client be released on bail. Lawyers for Borodin, who was arrested and jailed in Brooklyn on January... MORE

The Communist Party's electoral triumph in Moldova last week is being hailed by Russia's major political forces from the Reds to some reputed liberals such as Yabloko's Aleksei Arbatov and Vyacheslav Igrunov. Arbatov, vice chairman of the Duma's defense affairs committee, declared that the Communist... MORE

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo's three-day visit to Moscow this week, which included talks with President Vladimir Putin, followed what has of late become a common script in meetings between Russian and foreign leaders: an emphasis on boosting bilateral trade relations and, at least equally important,... MORE

The State Duma has scheduled a vote of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov for March 14. The vote, which was put on the agenda last month by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and other leftist factions in... MORE

Presidents Haidar Aliev and Robert Kocharian held direct talks on March 4-5 in Paris on possible solutions to the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. France hosted the meeting in her capacity as a co-chair--along with the United States and Russia--of the mediating group of the Organization for Security... MORE

Among the lesser-noted results of President Vladimir Putin's recent visit to South Korea was the signing of a preliminary agreement by which Moscow will sell several hundred million dollars worth of military hardware to South Korea in partial repayment of Russia's US$1.8 billion debt to... MORE

Despite this obvious emphasis on arms sales, it remains unclear precisely what was agreed upon in this area during Putin's visit to Seoul. The two sides did sign a memorandum of intentions on January 28, the substance of which, according to one Russian source, remains... MORE

The Federal Security Service's military counter-intelligence unit has freed Anatoly Fabritsyn, a 51-year-old native of Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast who had been held as a slave in the Chechen village of Makhety for ten years, Russian agencies reported. Fabrytsin was taken captive in 1990, when, after... MORE