The Media-Most group's troubles with the authorities increased yesterday, when the Prosecutor General's Office arrested Mikhail Aleksandrov, an assistant to Media-Most founder and chief Vladimir Gusinsky, after he appeared for questioning. Aleksandrov was charged with illegal weapons possession, in connections with pistol cartridges found in... MORE

Media-Most was threatened on another front yesterday. The giant state oil company LUKoil announced that it was suing NTV, Media-Most's television company, for 10 billion rubles (approximately US$357 million) in connection with a recent edition of "Sovershenno Sekretno" (Top Secret), an investigative program broadcast weekly... MORE

An initiative recommending that the statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky be re-erected on Lubyanka Square, just opposite the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB), failed today to pass the State Duma, the Russian parliament's lower house. The measure needed a minimum... MORE

Two recent Ukrainian-Polish high-level meetings discussed the need to accelerate and complete the construction of the Odesa-Gdansk transit project for Caspian oil. That project topped the agenda of the bilateral Presidential Consultative Committee session in Lviv on June 30, co-chaired by Ukraine's National Security and... MORE

The oil discovery, just announced at Kazakhstan's offshore field East Kashagan, could change the Caspian oil export picture in favor of the regional countries, the West and consumer countries in East-Central Europe, underscoring the common interests of these three sets of countries. It may also,... MORE

In keeping with the Kremlin's current focus on dealings with Russia's Asian neighbors, President Vladimir Putin turned his attention this week to both Russian-Japanese ties and his upcoming (albeit still only tentatively scheduled) summit talks in Tokyo. In a television interview given to the private... MORE

Sharp growth in investment spending is one of the more surprising aspects of Russia's economic recovery. After dropping by more than 75 percent during 1992-1998, gross investment in fixed capital--spending by businesses and households on new dwellings, factories and equipment, as well as on replacing... MORE

How can this case of "Russian exceptionalism" be explained? A number of possible causes present themselves. A sizable chunk of the capital stock inherited from the Soviet period turned out to be redundant in the market economy which took hold after 1992. Much of Russia's... MORE

President Vladimir Putin has implicitly criticized military and security officials for last weekend's series of Chechen rebel truck bombings. Putin, who made his comments during a stopover at the Russian military base in Mozdok, North Ossetia, while returning from a summit in Central Asia, said... MORE

Lithuania seems headed for one of those quadrennial political landslides which have become the norm in that country since its restoration. The governing Fatherland Union/Lithuanian Conservatives (FU/LC) led by Parliament Chairman Vytautas Landsbergis, as well as the allied Christian-Democratic Party (CDP), have splintered in recent... MORE