President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to arrive in Tokyo on Sunday where, for the next two days, he will hold summit talks with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Putin had appeared in no hurry earlier this year to schedule the Tokyo summit meeting, but, after... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin will sign a decree today forming a new State Council. He announced this yesterday during a trip to Samara Oblast, where he met with the regional leaders who make up the Volga federal district, one of seven new districts he decreed... MORE

Putin's imminent signing of the decree creating the State Council yielded an intriguing report today in a leading newspaper. Moskovsky komsomolets (M-K) reported that the president's meeting August 30 with his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, at the ex-president's residence at Gorky-9 outside Moscow, was devoted in... MORE

The Russian government has adopted a decision to withdraw from the multilateral agreement on visa-free travel by citizens of CIS member countries across those countries' borders. Nine member countries signed the original agreement in Bishkek in 1992. Three more countries afterward joined that system or... MORE

Belarusan President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and his closest Russian allies are seething in the wake of the August 30 session of the Council of Ministers of the Russia-Belarus Union State. Held in Moscow and chaired by Russia's Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the session demonstrated the inability... MORE

After days of being pummeled by the Russian media for the confusion and secretiveness which characterized its efforts to deal with the Kursk submarine tragedy, the Russian government moved this week to plan the recovery of the sub's lost crew and produced ... more confusion... MORE

President Vladimir Putin has reportedly approved a draft presented to him by the Kremlin's legal experts of a decree creating a new State Council, and will sign both the decree and corresponding regulations as early as the beginning of September (Segodnya, Obshchaya gazeta, August 31).... MORE

Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, the Geneva magistrate who is leading an investigation into the alleged diversion of a US$4.8 billion International Monetary Fund credit to Russia in the summer of 1998, has again accused the Russian authorities of lack of cooperation in the investigation. In an interview... MORE

Russia's Foreign Affairs Ministry announced yesterday that Uzbekistan has officially requested "military-technical assistance" to counter the Islamist rebels on its territory. Uzbek Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Abdusamat Haidarov submitted the request on August 28 in Moscow to Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the first deputy foreign affairs minister... MORE

News reports out of Moscow this week suggest that two days of talks between Russian and U.S. government officials may have done little to clear up lingering American concerns regarding the "missile deal" said to have been discussed last month by Russian President Vladimir Putin... MORE