Ukraine is anxious to help construct a new and prosperous Silk Road, President Leonid Kuchma told Chinese businessmen on December 5, the second day of his visit to Beijing. With that reference to the ancient trade route linking Rome and China, Kuchma's bid for Chinese... MORE

Special presidential advisor Richard Morningstar, coordinator of US aid to CIS member countries, told Ukrainian deputy prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko on December 5 that Ukraine's slow progress toward small business privatization could threaten further US investment in its economy. Morningstar also reminded Lazarenko that Ukrainian... MORE

Russia will deploy thousands of armed police across the country next week in an effort to prevent violence from disrupting the December 17 election. Violence in breakaway Chechnya and an upsurge of bombs, hijacks and contract killings, many of them in Moscow, have contributed to... MORE

Russia is concerned about the fate of Sarajevo Serbs and may support a French proposal to grant them additional security guarantees not stipulated in the Dayton peace accords, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said yesterday. But the official claimed in the same breath that... MORE

The Russian government sent a special commission to eastern Siberia on December 5 to see if local defense plants could carry out direct arms exports. The commission has thus far inspected the aircraft plant Progress in Arsenyev (Maritime Territory) which makes helicopters of the Black... MORE

Kazakhstan held indirect elections to the upper house of its parliament yesterday, and goes on to hold direct elections to the lower house December 9. Under Kazakhstan's constitution, the country's 20 administrative units--19 regions and the capital city--each elect two senators in a two-tiered process.... MORE

Karabakh leaders believe that they have sucessfully weathered pressure to make unilateral concessions at last week's round of OSCE-and Russian-mediated negotiations in Bonn. Stepanakert, the unrecognized republic's foreign minister Arkady Gukasian told a news conference that Karabakh (with Armenia's support) was able to defend the... MORE

President Aleksandr Lukashenko yesterday outlined his position on relations with Russia in a telegram addressed to fifteen Russian nationalist and red blocs and parties who are contesting this month's Duma elections. Lukashenko declared that "there is no alternative to the drawing together of the fraternal... MORE

A special commission of the Main Staff of Russia's Navy has been working in Crimea since December 1, together with a commission of Ukraine's naval command, on arrangements for handing over some Russian naval bases and coastal installations to Ukraine. The partition of the bases... MORE

The head of a major oil trading company in Karelia was shot dead near his Petrozavodsk home yesterday, the latest of a string of businessmen to be killed. Albert Appolonov, 64, was general director of Rosika, the region's largest oil trading company, and also had... MORE