The rumors surrounding the political fate of Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Kudrin have intensified this week. Kudrin, who is also Russia's finance minister, was summoned November 17 by the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office in connection with a criminal investigation into alleged machinations with the city's... MORE

Magomed Khachilaev, the former Dagestani parliamentary deputy and leader of "Kazi-Kumukh," the national movement of the Laksk, one of Dagestan's largest ethnic groups, died on November 19 from wounds he received in an attack four days earlier. Khachilaev was shot on November 15 by his... MORE

This past week, the conflict between the Chuvash Republic President Nikolai Fedorov and Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed all the characteristics of a war. Fedorov has from the start been a strong critic of Putin's new federal policy. He spearheaded the opposition in the Federation... MORE

November 19 marked a milestone in President Vladimir Putin's ongoing campaign against the leaders of Russia's regions. On that day, in Kaliningrad Oblast, the Kremlin scored its first clear victory over a governor on his own territory. Admiral Vladimir Yegorov, commander of the Russian Navy's... MORE

As anticipated on the basis of Azerbaijani precedent (see the Monitor, November 3), overzealous local officials served the government poorly by inflating the victory margin of the ruling party in the November 5 parliamentary elections. Seventeen days after balloting day, the overall returns have yet... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared unexpectedly yesterday to throw down the gauntlet to the country's military leadership. In a brief speech to senior officers containing a number of harsh criticisms, Putin strongly suggested that the military leadership had itself ossified and that the current state... MORE

It is unclear exactly when yesterday's meeting between Putin and the generals was arranged. Putin was addressing an annual convocation of senior Russian officers drawn from military and naval units across the breadth of Russia. That meeting actually began in the middle of last week,... MORE

The Russian and Ukrainian prime ministers' negotiations on November 18 in Moscow have left the problem of Russian gas supplies to Ukraine for this winter and next year in suspense. The tenor of those negotiations and follow-up statements suggest that Moscow is interested in prolonging... MORE

A year has passed since Leonid Kuchma was re-elected to the Ukrainian presidency on November 14, 1999. Last week, marking this anniversary, Kuchma came up with a few important additions to the political course he proclaimed in the inauguration speech a year ago (see the... MORE

Congresses of two new--but already quite strong--center-left forces over the weekend signaled that the Ukrainian party spectrum is undergoing serious changes. The "red" leftists have not recovered since their defeat in the presidential election a year ago, and the former "party of power"--People's Democrats--have lost... MORE