Moldova's Foreign Affairs Ministry announced yesterday that the Russian side has promised to submit by the end of this month a timetable for removing and/or scrapping the Russian arsenals from Moldova, as required by the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe. The Russians... MORE

Precipitated by the August 1998 Russian financial crisis, Moldova suffered a full-scale balance-of-payments crisis in late 1998 and 1999. Moldova's crisis rapidly reversed the substantial progress which the government and the National Bank of Moldova (NBM) had made over the previous three years toward establishing... MORE

UN human rights chief Mary Robinson's fact-finding mission to Russia drew to an acrimonious close yesterday as Robinson's call for an international investigation into Russian abuses in Chechnya was met with denunciations and even personal insults from the Russian government. Moscow's protestations were the result... MORE

While President-elect Vladimir Putin promised during the election campaign that Russia's "oligarchs" would cease to exist as a class, the situation in the country's aluminum sector suggests that this was little more than campaign sloganeering. Reports over the weekend indicated that the two rival financial-industrial... MORE

On March 29, Ukraine's Constitutional Court gave a green light to the constitutional referendum President Leonid Kuchma scheduled for April 16 (see the Monitor, January 21, February 23). At the same time, the court struck down the two most controversial of the six referendum questions.... MORE

During his March 28-29 visit to Georgia, President Robert Kocharian issued another set of signals of his willingness to extricate Armenia from dependency on Russia and to promote a more balanced policy. Kocharian made two significant gestures, both of which run counter to Russian policy... MORE

Kocharian's visit to Georgia followed that of Azerbaijan's President Haidar Aliev the preceding week (see the Monitor, March 20, April 3 and the Fortnight in Review, March 31). As Aliev and Kocharian suggested in their public statements, the bilateral peace negotiations are stalled due to... MORE

President-elect Vladimir Putin traveled to a leading Russian nuclear design center in Russia's Chelyabinsk region on March 31, his first official visit since his election on March 26, and one of symbolic importance for several different reasons. For one, the visit to the Chelyabinsk-70 complex... MORE

President-elect Vladimir Putin is likely to be inaugurated as Russian head of state on May 7, according to Aleksandr Veshnyakov, chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC). In an interview aired yesterday, Veshnyakov said that the CEC plans to issue the official results of the... MORE

Russian forces and separatist rebels continue to fight it out in the Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt regions of Chechnya. According to Yuri Balyuevski, deputy head of the Russian armed forces' general staff, the rebels' main bases are located in these regions. Balyuevski also said that the... MORE