Visiting Russia's Tyumen Oblast--the principal source of Russian oil and gas--on February 11-13, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma spoke up repeatedly against the proposals to lay a gas export pipeline to Europe bypassing Ukraine. On February 13 in the Kremlin, Ukraine's presidential administration chief Volodymyr Litvin... MORE

After a period of relative silence, the Kremlin this week began to make clear its discomfort with some of the policies set out or implied in U.S. President George W. Bush's January 29 State-of-the Union speech. The biggest salvo from Moscow came in a two-hour... MORE

Boris Nadezhdin, a State Deputy with the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS), announced on February 12 that his faction was drafting legislation that would, among other things, make "committing an outrage" against the Russian president subject to strict legal sanctions, up to and including the... MORE

On February 11, another attempt was made on the life of North Ossetia's Interior Minister, Kazbek Dzantiev. An explosion took place around 7:20 a.m., Moscow time, after the minister exited his home in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia's capital, and was walking toward his official car. According... MORE

On February 11 in Riga, Germany's Foreign Affairs Minister Joschka Fischer at last put his government unambiguously on record in favor of issuing NATO membership invitations to all three Baltic states this year. Fischer and his Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts, holding a landmark meeting... MORE

Diplomatic jousting between Moscow and Tokyo over the four disputed South Kuril Islands took an unexpected turn last week when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi used a public address to press Tokyo's claim on the Russian controlled territories. In remarks made on February 7 during... MORE

Viktor Kazantsev, presidential envoy to the Southern federal district, yesterday confirmed the appointment of Bislan Gantamirov, the controversial former mayor of Djohar (Grozny), Chechnya's capital, as the republic's press and information minister, with the rank of vice premier. Prior to his new appointment, Gantamirov was... MORE

Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya today denied the claim made by the Russian military command earlier this week that she had been detained in Chechnya for arriving there in violation of rules established by the Kremlin's information department and had subsequently "disappeared in an unknown... MORE

President Eduard Shevardnadze is being driven into Moscow's "peacekeeping" embrace not only by an ineffectual UN, but also by the erosion of his internal political support. With more than three years to go in his last presidential term, Shevardnadze's popularity is at an all-time low... MORE

Clouds are gathering again over Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma: In Ukraine, a group of MPs is accusing him of embezzlement, and the outgoing parliament has formally initiated an impeachment procedure; in the United States, a former FBI expert has determined that the taped conversations that... MORE