Russia's policy on Moldova focused all along on the goal of securing a permanent military presence there. Its international obligation, tactically accepted in 1999, to withdraw all its troops from Moldova by December 2002 did not alter that strategic goal. From 1999 on, much circumstantial... MORE

Is the Kremlin planning to kill two birds with one stone by replacing the independent TV-6 television channel with one devoted to one of President Vladimir Putin's main passions--sports? On January 29, Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matvienko announced that Putin had ordered the government to... MORE

Andrei Brushlinsky, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychology, was found murdered at the entrance to his apartment building in southwest Moscow last night. According to news reports, the 69-year-old professor had apparently first been hit in the head by his attackers,... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal last week for a "Eurasian" association of gas exporting countries (see the Monitor, January 24) would position Russia as a permanent and monopolistic intermediary between Central Asia's gas exporting countries and Europe. Under the proposal, all of Turkmenistan's, Uzbekistan's and--potentially--Kazakhstan's... MORE

Azerbaijani President Haidar Aliev's January 24-27 visit to Moscow seems to have opened a new stage in bilateral relations, promising stable and businesslike cooperation. Russian President Vladimir Putin in turn aims for a more balanced Russian position between allied Armenia and the latter's rival Azerbaijan.... MORE

An op-ed piece written by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and published in the January 27 edition of the New York Times appeared to mark one more effort by Moscow to stem a slow erosion in relations between the two countries that has developed since... MORE

The battle between Boris Berezovsky and the Russian authorities escalated once again yesterday, when the Prosecutor General's Office added new charges to the so-called Aeroflot case, in which Swiss front companies set up by the tycoon were allegedly used to embezzle funds from Russia's state... MORE

Ukrainian politics is not about parties, or even ideologies. It is about personalities. This has become especially obvious in the run-up to the March 31 parliamentary (Verkhovna Rada) elections. Several political blocs are named after their leaders, marginal groups include the namesakes of popular leaders... MORE

Former presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko, whose famous records of talks in Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma's office ignited a political crisis in Ukraine last year, may return home. Fearing arrest, he fled Ukraine in late 2000 and was granted refugee status in the United States early... MORE

In yet another indignity for Russia's once-proud armed forces, energy companies in the country's Far Eastern and Siberian regions have begun over the past week to switch off energy supplies to a number of military installations. The cutoffs, which are being attributed to the army's... MORE