Recent suggestions from major European chancelleries to include Russia in NATO's decisionmaking process were individual initiatives, poorly coordinated with one another, and required a collective allied effort to water them down in the advent of upcoming summits. The proposals share a common set of omissions.... MORE

The secretary of Ukraine's Security and Defense Council, Yevhen Marchuk, is again having a difficult time fending off accusations of illegal arms trade. Late last year, the media linked to Marchuk's rival Andry Derkach, son of former Security Service chief Leonid Derkach, reported that Marchuk... MORE

Rumors continue to circulate that Aleksei Miller, the head of Gazprom, the 38-percent state-owned natural gas monopoly, may be on his way out after less than one year as the gas giant's CEO. On Tuesday (March 12), an official from the Moscow department of the... MORE

President Vladimir Putin visited the offices of Izvestia, one of Russia's leading newspapers, yesterday to wish it a happy 85th birthday. During his visit to the newspaper, he discussed a number of issues with the journalists assembled there. One item was U.S-Russian relations: The president... MORE

Recent blunders by Moldova's Communist authorities risk adding a confrontation in the south to the conflict in the east of Moldova. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and the Turkish government are expressing concern. Moldova is home to... MORE

A systematic purge of the security apparatus is underway in Turkmenistan, with ample publicity in the state media. President Saparmurat Niazov launched this operation on March 4. Some of those purged are being subjected to lengthy, televised dressing-downs by Niazov personally. In the opening move,... MORE

A high-ranking Russian lawmaker managed yesterday to create a minor diplomatic scandal--and apparently embarrass his government--when he unexpectedly canceled a planned meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during an official visit to Jerusalem. Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov's action left the Russian Foreign Ministry scrambling... MORE

Viktor Vasiliev, the director of the Moscow division of the Tax Police, said yesterday that the Tax Police were investigating whether Gazprom had evaded paying 30 billion rubles (some US$1 billion) in taxes. A decision would be made, he said, by the end of March... MORE

The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta this week published an interview with Ruslan Aushev, who was president of the neighboring republic of Ingushetia from 1993 to this past January, concerning the situation in neighboring Chechnya. The interview was noteworthy in that Aushev, who remains a member of... MORE

On March 7 in Ashgabat, Turkmen President Saparmurat Niazov and the visiting interim prime minister of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, agreed to readdress the project of a trans-Afghan export pipeline for Turkmen gas to Pakistan and possibly India. The project finds favor with the United States... MORE