President Vladimir Putin has reiterated his previously stated promise that the controversial privatization deals of the previous decade, which helped create Russia's class of powerful "oligarchs," will not be overturned. Speaking yesterday, the head of state declared that the most important outcome of his July... MORE

Despite the good intentions which the tycoons and the Kremlin declared during and after their July 28 meeting, and the various optimistic assessments of the meeting, it is not clear that the meeting changed anything significantly. Afterward, one of the participants from the business side,... MORE

Nikolai Volkov, a top investigator with the Prosecutor General's Office, said on July 28 that it was possible that Russian law enforcement may soon launch an investigation into the alleged diversion of the IMF stabilization credit sent to Russia in the summer of 1998. Speaking... MORE

Russia and the United States last week found themselves at loggerheads yet again over UN policy toward Baghdad, as Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz completed a three-day visit to Moscow which included a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. On July 28, Russian Foreign Minister... MORE

On July 23-25, Armenia's defense minister and political grey eminence Serge Sarkisian paid his first official visit to the United States. On July 27-28, official Yerevan hosted NATO's assistant secretary general for political affairs, Klaus Peter Klaiber. And in September, NATO's Secretary General George Robertson... MORE

On July 28, following stormy debates among the political parties, Armenia's parliament approved the sale of electricity distribution networks to Western private firms, as opposed to Russian state-controlled companies. President Robert Kocharian and the government headed by Andranik Margarian had been pushing this privatization program... MORE

More than a week after the appearance of reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had negotiated an agreement by which North Korea would give up its ballistic missile development program, there appear still to be more questions than answers as to what exactly it was... MORE

Only two days after Russia's Supreme Court overturned a conviction on spying charges against one Russian diplomat (see the Monitor, July 27), a Moscow court yesterday sentenced another to eleven years' imprisonment in a separate espionage case. Platon Obukhov, the son of a former Soviet... MORE

Details remain sketchy about the events surrounding the decision by the Prosecutor General's Office to drop criminal charges against Media-Most head Vladimir Gusinsky. The media magnate flew to Spain yesterday amid contradictory reports about whether prosecutors had not only dropped the charges, but also closed... MORE

The tax authorities have begun an audit of TV-6, one of the outlets in the media empire controlled by Boris Berezovsky. The federal tax police yesterday visited the television station's offices in Moscow, after which its general director, Aleksandr Ponomarev, said that the visit was... MORE