Leaders of South Ossetia, an ethnic region in northern Georgia, have rejected President Eduard Shevardnadze's plans to include their territory within a new, federal Georgian state, Segodnya reported June 17. The South Ossetians still want either to be part of Russia or to be totally... MORE

Armenian and Azerbaijani negotiators have agreed to extend their talks in Helsinki to the end of the month, the Noyan Tapan news agency reported June 19. Earlier rounds of the OSCE talks have lasted only four to five days; the extension suggests that the two... MORE

Authorities in Yerevan turned on the power at the Metzamor atomic energy station June 19, the Noyan Tapan news agency reported. The plant--which has been shut down since the 1986 earthquake threatened its physical integrity--will undergo at least a month of tests before being loaded... MORE

Russian deputy premier Aleksei Bolshakov and Kazakh vice premier Nigmatzhan Isingarin have initialed an agreement transferring the central Kazakhstan town of Leninsk to Russian jurisdiction for a minimum of 20 years, Kommersant-Dailyreported June 17. The town is near the Baikonur space center which Russia has... MORE

Russia's arms export body Rosvooruzheniye has found a new market for old Soviet weapons, but it is one that the agency has tried to keep quiet, Izvestiya reported June 17. That is because Rosvooruzheniye has sold an old Soviet nuclear submarine to a museum in... MORE

More than 100 armed men raided the city of Budenovsk not far from the border between Chechnya and Krasnodar kray June 14, Itar-Tass reported. Armed with automatic weapons, the attackers killed more than 40 people and took up to 500 hostages. Negotiations were taking place... MORE

The only "8" in the G-7 meetings to be held in Halifax this week are the eight advisors preparing Yeltsin to go there, Russian television reported June 14. Other Russian commentaries were similarly bleak in their assessments of Yeltsin's chances of getting the group to... MORE

The foreign ministry released a statement denouncing all "illegal" attacks on UN peacekeepers in Bosnia and calling for negotiations to end the conflict, Tass reported June 14. The Black Sea Fleet Agreement That Wasn't.

Both Russian and Ukrainian commentaries suggested that the agreement between the presidents of the two countries had solved very little. Krasnaya zvezda on June 14 said that no one was happy with the ambiguities of the accord, ambiguities that will mean the dispute will continue... MORE

First deputy nuclear energy minister Vitaly Konovalov said June 14 that Washington was putting the Russian sale of enriched uranium at risk by backing a US private company's demand that prices earlier agreed to now be cut, Interfax reported. Meanwhile, nuclear energy minister Viktor Mikhailov... MORE