The Council of Internal Affairs Ministers of CIS member countries conferred on September 8 in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, against the backdrop of the Islamic insurgency in and around that country. Russia's first deputy minister of internal affairs, Valery Fyodorov, stated afterward that the meeting had "proceeded... MORE

Tajikistan's fragile economic recovery from its five years of domestic conflict seems to be continuing. But recent reports indicate that the recovery could be imperiled by a combination of a serious drought and the fighting in neighboring Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. And--as in Kyrgyzstan--economic prospects in... MORE

Despite official declarations to the contrary, Azerbaijan's long-awaited second stage of privatization, which ground to a halt in 1999, has recorded only limited success in 2000. Under this program Baku is to sell many off half of the country's strategic, "blue chip" enterprises, including the... MORE

Azerbaijan's privatization program could be boosted by the opening of the Baku Stock Exchange (BSE) which was to have begun operations in late July. Initially only treasury bills, privatization vouchers and depositary receipts for Russian shares were to be traded. Trading in shares of large,... MORE

During a ninety-minute meeting between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin in New York on September 6, Clinton reportedly raised the issue of Edmond Pope, a U.S. businessman who has been imprisoned in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo Prison since early April on espionage... MORE

Preliminary figures released by Goskomstat in mid-August show that Russia posted a whopping $28.4 billion trade surplus during the first half of the year. When matched with preliminary output data for the same period, this surplus translates into 27 percent of Russia's first-half GDP. In... MORE

While Russia's imports are also rising this year, this growth has been much more moderate than that of exports. The US$20.7 billion in imports reported at mid-year was only 8 percent above the total reported for the first half of 1999. The weak ruble continues... MORE

On September 6 in New York, Presidents Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia, Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, Haidar Aliev of Azerbaijan and Petru Lucinschi of Moldova, plus an unnamed representative of Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, held an informal summit of the GUUAM group of these five countries.... MORE

The major espionage row which erupted between Japan and Russia last week continues to generate more questions than answers. It is being described as Japan's biggest spy scandal in some twenty years and is the first between Moscow and Tokyo since 1980, when several army... MORE

There have been contradictory reports over the last few days concerning capture of high-level Russian military officers by Chechen rebels. Agence France Press quoted an official representative of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov as saying that rebel fighters took a Russian general and two colonels prisoner... MORE