A week-long stay in the United States by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov--which included talks with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the UN and with U.S. President Bill Clinton and other administration officials in Washington--appears to have done little to improve troubled ties... MORE

The terrorist bombings in Russia this month--which have killed nearly 300 people and become part of the justification for Moscow's attacks on Chechnya--continue to be the subject of wide speculation. While the police have arrested a number of suspects, they say that the three men... MORE

The Russian Air Force continued over the weekend massive air raids on Chechnya, hitting oil facilities, a television tower and a cellular phone network. Thousands of inhabitants of the Chechen capital, Djohar, fled into neighboring Ingushetia. The head of Ingushetia's migration service said yesterday that... MORE

Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeev announced yesterday that Moscow is considering a ground operation in Chechnya. "There are several variants for a land operation, which will be carried out depending on the developing situation," he said, while visiting soldiers wounded during fighting in Dagestan and... MORE

Central Asian governments, individually and collectively, seem to be looking somewhat blindly for an appropriate response to the Islamic insurgency underway in the Tajik-Kyrgyz-Uzbek border area. The response is developing on two levels: first, military measures to isolate the insurgent-held corner of Kyrgyzstan and localize... MORE

In a telephone conversation on September 20, Russian President Boris Yeltsin reassured his Belarusan counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka that Moscow "deems inadmissible any attempts by Western countries to exert pressure on Belarus. Russia's Foreign Affairs Ministry and other government agencies will continue rebuffing such attempts" (Minsk... MORE

Some Russian politicians, however, continue to draw different conclusions from the current scandal enveloping their country. Samara Governor Konstantin Titov told a meeting of Swedish politicians, businessmen and journalists yesterday that the Bank of New York scandal was aimed against the attempts of Presidents Clinton... MORE

While senior Clinton administration officials were busy with their damage limitation efforts, the Russian money laundering scandal appeared to be widening. U.S. investigators were cited yesterday as saying that as many as ten banks may have been used to divert as much as US$15 billion... MORE

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings yesterday on the subject of Russian corruption. Among those who testified were former CIA and NSA official Fritz Ermarth and E. Wayne Merry, who served as a political officer in the U.S. embassy in Moscow until 1994. Both... MORE

The Russian government, meanwhile, has been feeling some heat in recent months from Iraqi authorities, who are urging Moscow to step up efforts aimed at winning a lifting of sanctions. In remarks to reporters yesterday, Baghdad's ambassador to Russia, Hassan Fahmi Jumah, appeared to chide... MORE