Last week, a group of deputies in the city council of Ivano-Frankivsk (in western Ukraine) drafted a motion to rehabilitate twenty-four local surviving veterans of the Nazi SS Galicia division. This sparked a fierce debate that showed how deeply Ukraine is divided over its history.... MORE

Relations between Russia and Japan, already strained by recent setbacks in negotiations over a long-standing territorial dispute, took another hit last week when Japanese authorities moved toward lodging espionage charges against a former Russian trade official. According to reports out of Tokyo and Moscow, Aleksei... MORE

The results of the March 17 elections for the chairman of the government of the Tyva Republic, located in southern Siberia and one of the more separatist-minded Russian regions, were announced last week. Sherig-ool Oorzhak, who has been the republic's president for ten years, won... MORE

President Vladimir Putin has intervened in the dispute between Krasnoyarsk Krai and the Taimyr (Dolgan-Nenetsk) Autonomous District, which has been worsening in recent months. The dispute involves the status of Norilsk, the largest industrial center of Russia's Arctic region and the location of the country's... MORE

India has long leaned heavily on Russia to equip its armed forces with military hardware. A decision last week by Defense Minister George Fernandes to postpone a planned visit to Moscow, however, has served to highlight possible new tensions in this area. Fernandes was to... MORE

The main centrist factions in the State Duma have launched an effort to remove Gennady Seleznev as the lower parliamentary chamber's speaker. The moves against Seleznev, who is a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), began last week when the Duma's... MORE

As the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) elections of March 31 loom ever closer, the pressure on the frontrunner, former Premier Viktor Yushchenko, and his bloc Our Ukraine, is mounting. President Leonid Kuchma would like to have a Rada majority based on his For United Ukraine (FUU)... MORE

Apathy and mistrust is coloring the run-up to Ukraine's March 31 parliamentary elections. Last year, for the first time, Ukraine passed an election law guaranteeing representation to different political parties on district electoral commissions. By March 24, some 944 foreign election observers were registered, the... MORE

An unhappy chapter in relations between Russia and Canada was brought to an apparently satisfactory close this week when a Moscow court sentenced a former Russian diplomat to four years in prison for his role in a deadly accident in January of last year in... MORE

Quoting unnamed "diplomatic sources," Russia's Interfax news agency reported yesterday that an earlier cancelled visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi to Moscow has been rescheduled for the first week of April. Kharrazi had originally been scheduled to visit the Russian capital on February 19-20.... MORE