The newly elected Belarusian parliament opened today with only 198 out of 260 seats filled. Those seats were contested in the three rounds of balloting held in May, November, and December 1995. The shortfall in deputies is largely attributable to the efforts of President Aleksandr... MORE

Estonian president Lennart Meri, Prime Minister Tiit Vahi, defense minister Andrus Oovel, and acting Army Commander Col. Vello Loemaa conferred January 8 in Tallinn with Danish defense minister Hans Haekkerup. The parties discussed military cooperation on the bilateral and regional level, as well as joint... MORE

U.S. defense secretary William Perry and Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers Pavel Grachev and Valery Shmarov witnessed January 5 the destruction of an SS-19 strategic missile silo at Pervomaisk. Located in the Nikolaev region, Pervomaisk was once billed the world's largest nuclear missile base. The... MORE

Vladimir Bashmachnikov, president of Russia's Association of Farmers and Agricultural Cooperatives, yesterday called the election of a few farmers to the new Duma "the first bridgehead won by farmers and other landowners." The farmers were elected on the "Russia is Our Home" party list. Agricultural... MORE

Yeltsin attended a special mass on Russian Orthodox Christmas January 7 to mark the consecration of the bells in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Together with Patriarch Aleksii, the Russian president laid the last stone in the outer wall of the new cathedral. The... MORE

"New Russians" number approximately 300,000 in Moscow, 150,000 in St. Petersburg, and about 2 million in Russia as a whole, according to experts of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sociology Institute. Russia runs against the tide, they report. In most advanced industrial countries, affluence tends... MORE

Should Yeltsin run for a second presidential term in June, Viktor Chernomyrdin's future looks bleak. Not simply because Yeltsin, rather than his prime minister, would be the candidate of the ruling coalition, but because the Russian president will have to reinvent himself as a populist... MORE

The Ministry of Defense is incapable of ensuring the proper storage of nuclear materials now under its control, regional inspectorate head of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry Aleksandr Kanygin charges. Kanygin, who published his charges in a recent article in Izvestiya, blames the situation on... MORE

An earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale this morning rocked the town of Okha, 35 miles from Neftegorsk on Sakhalin island in the Russian Far East. Unlike Neftegorsk, where 2,000 died in an earthquake last year, no one was reported killed in Okha. (4)... MORE

Switzerland has expelled an unnamed Russian diplomat for spying, a Swiss government spokesman said January 7. The diplomat, who had been attached to Russia's mission at the U.N. in Geneva, returned to Russia December 21. (5) Moscow Struggles to Regulate Toxic Waste Imports...