On July 21, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev's office announced that he had signed the law adopted on June 27 by the parliament which conferred on him a lifetime political role. The law had required the president's signature. Nazarbaev acted one day after the Constitutional Council... MORE

The one-time spy who is now Russia's president racked up yet another improbable diplomatic triumph over the weekend as he managed to wow leaders of the Group of Seven countries during their annual summit meeting, which took place this year on the Japanese island of... MORE

Novye Izvestia reported last week that President Vladimir Putin's "retinue"--above all the Security Council, the powerful Kremlin advisory body headed by Sergei Ivanov, a long-time Putin associate and fellow KGB veteran--has drawn up a plan to establish "total control" over Russian's media. According to the... MORE

In recent interviews with the Belarusan and Russian military press, ranking officers of both countries have thrown some light on the military dimension of the Russia-Belarus Union. It is, on the whole and at the moment, developing faster than the political one. Nevertheless, the much-touted... MORE

Prime Ministers Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine and Mikhail Kasyanov of Russia, with massive government delegations, held talks on July 19 in Moscow on restructuring Ukraine's heavy debts for Russian gas. Those debts notwithstanding, Kyiv's delegation sought agreement on expanding the volume and easing the commercial... MORE

The Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), already weakened by the formation of the pro-presidential majority in parliament toward the end of 1999, is continuing to face bad times. Still fearing the CPU's ability to mobilize the protest vote, the center-right force has launched the creation... MORE

President Vladimir Putin wound up a groundbreaking, two-day visit to Pyongyang yesterday hailed by many Russian media as a resounding success for both Putin and Russian diplomacy. But the key accomplishment of the visit--a reported statement of willingness by North Korea to abandon its missile... MORE

The International Monetary Fund has denied charges made in an Italian newspaper that all or part of its US$4.8 billion "stabilization credit" sent to Moscow in July 1998 was diverted, and that Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who at the time was a deputy finance minister,... MORE

General Valery Manilov, first deputy head of the Russian armed forces' general staff, said yesterday that the Chechen rebel forces became significantly more active this past week. Sixty-three shooting incidents. Twenty-five Russian servicemen killed. Seventy-four wounded. Manilov said he thought that the increase in the... MORE

On July 17 in Vienna, a special session of the Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reviewed Russia's performance in complying with the OSCE's decisions on the removal of Russian forces from Moldova. Those decisions, made at the OSCE's... MORE