The Belarus parliament February 20 rejected President Aleksandr Lukashenko's nominee for chairman of the Central Bank on the grounds that Lukashenko did not submit the nomination to the parliament as required by the constitution. In an accompanying violation, the president announced his intention to subordinate... MORE

NATO is set to begin this year discussions on enlargement with individual countries aspiring to become members of the alliance, according to the NATO Secretary General's senior advisor Christopher Donnelly, who was cited by Baltic media reports. Donnelly said at a briefing in Riga that... MORE

The central Russian region of Ulyanovsk is famous not only because it is LeninÕs birthplace, but also because of the refusal of local leaders to implement market reforms. Prices and wages have been kept artificially low and foodstuffs distributed to the citizenry according to a... MORE

Projecting the image of an implacable warrior against corruption in high places, Yeltsin yesterday sacked the head of the Russian diamond industry just as he was sitting down to sensitive negotiations with the worldÕs leading diamond conglomerate. Yeltsin accused Yevgeny Bychkov, chairman of the Russian... MORE

South Korean military sources indicated yesterday that Seoul is considering the purchase of Russian-made S-300 ground-to-air missile defense systems. The S-300 has been touted by Moscow as superior to the U.S. Patriot missile, which was used with great fanfare during the Gulf War. South Korean... MORE

On the sixth day of one of the war's largest operations to date and amid a continuing information blackout, the Russian command in Chechnya and the Defense Ministry in Moscow yesterday made premature claims of victory in Novogroznensky. Dropping the contention that 1,000 Chechen fighters... MORE

U.S. President Bill Clinton and NATO secretary general Javier Solana, meeting in Washington February 20, reaffirmed their support for "steady, deliberate" progress in expanding the NATO military alliance. During a speech at Georgetown University, Solana described the conflict in Bosnia as a "wake-up call" to... MORE

Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, a Middle East expert, lamented Russia's loss of influence in that part of the world yesterday and said that Russian diplomacy should be more active there. Primakov was not specific in his comments, made during a visit to the Kazakh... MORE

For western leaders, foreign policy toward Russia has of late descended into a torturous process of formulating statements of support for Boris Yeltsin that suggest neither interference in Russia's internal affairs nor an over-reliance on faith in the incumbent. Failure on the first count, it... MORE

1. ORT, February 20; BBC World Service, February 21 2. Reuter, Interfax, & RTR, "Vesti," February 20 3. Interfax, February 20 Interfax, February 4 and 18 5. Reuter, February 20 6. Interfax, Itar-Tass, NTV, western agencies, February 20 7. Novaya gazeta, February 14 The Monitor... MORE