State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev said today that a treaty creating a union between Belarus and Russia could be signed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Belarus President Alyaksandr Lukashenka by this fall. Seleznev made his comments during a visit to Minsk, where he is... MORE

Less than two weeks after the United States and Russia hammered out an agreement defining Moscow's role in the Kosovo peacekeeping force, NATO negotiators have apparently been confronted this week with a set of new demands by Moscow. Reports said yesterday that three days of... MORE

Russia and the U.S. yesterday downplayed the significance of a published report suggesting that U.S. fighters had been forced to intercept two Russian strategic bombers as they approached the borders of Iceland last week. The incident, reported by yesterday's "Washington Post," occurred in the early... MORE

Russian border troops are in the process of giving up control of some key sectors of Georgia's borders, though not necessarily into the right hands. In the Ajaria sector of the Georgian-Turkish border, the transfer is proceeding smoothly and in a manner consistent with Georgia's... MORE

In a broadcast to the country on June 28, President Eduard Shevardnadze announced a decision just made by the National Security Council to modernize Georgia's air defenses with Western support. The decision, in the making for some time, was precipitated by the June 18 incident... MORE

On June 24, Georgia's ambassador to the Benelux countries, Zurab Abashidze--who is also the country's liaison with NATO--underscored Tbilisi's goal to work toward meeting the criteria for NATO membership. Abashidze set this effort in a medium-term perspective of "some years." "We do not expect to... MORE

Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former prime minister and, most recently, President Boris Yeltsin's special representative on the Balkans crisis, was elected yesterday chairman of the board of Gazprom, Russia's giant natural gas monopoly, which Chernomyrdin founded and once headed. Rem Vyakhirev, Gazprom's chief executive, held on... MORE

The leaders of Russian and Belarus are apparently not reading from the same script when it comes to plans for uniting the two countries. According to one report, Russian President Boris Yeltsin is pushing for a version of a Russia-Belarus union in which the latter... MORE

Sadly for LUKoil, the odds seem slim that UN Security Council members will reach an agreement in the near future to lift the sanctions on Iraq. The council has been deeply divided over policy toward Baghdad since the launching of U.S. and British airstrikes on... MORE

Iraq appeared to back off this week from a threat to cancel a lucrative oil deal with Russian petroleum giant LUKoil. But the announcement that the two sides had resolved their differences, made on June 29 by the Iraqi Oil Ministry in Baghdad, may signify... MORE