The chiefs of intelligence services of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan convened on March 26-27 in Baku on the occasion of the Azerbaijan National Security Ministry's 80th anniversary. The chiefs reviewed current developments in the South Caucasus and Central Asia and signed an... MORE

President Haidar Aliev yesterday revealed that Russia has recently offered to supply Azerbaijan with weapons equivalent to those that Russia is in the process of deploying in Armenia--namely, MiG-29 interceptor aircraft and S-300 surface-to-air missiles. Aliev made the disclosure during talks with Moscow Mayor Yuri... MORE

Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Leonid Drachevsky and Nikolai Gribov, the Russian co-chairman of the Minsk Group, met with leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Karabakh on March 24-28 in Baku and Yerevan. The Minsk Group members are those mediators appointed by the Organization for Security and... MORE

Thousands of Minsk residents (5,000 by the authorities' understated count) demonstrated on March 28 to mark the anniversary of the Belarusan National Republic (BNR), which existed fleetingly in 1918. The national-democratic opposition, and all who resist re-sovietization and russification, consider the BNR a precursor of... MORE

Russia's Interior Ministry has sent a statement to various news media organizations claiming that four groups of terrorists trained in camps in Chechnya have been sent to other parts of Russia to carry out terrorist acts. These camps are said to be controlled by Jordanian... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin will deliver his annual "state of the nation" address to the Russian parliament today. According to an advance copy obtained by a Western news service, Yeltsin will stress the need to push "the normalization of Russian-American relations" and arms control despite the... MORE

Yeltsin is undoubtedly hoping to use today's parliamentary address on the state of the nation to help bolster his position. This has been noticeably weakened recently by recent allegations of corruption inside the Kremlin apparatus and Yeltsin's inner circle, and by the defiance of Yeltsin... MORE

Amid continuing denunciations in Moscow of NATO military actions in Yugoslavia, Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced yesterday that he would send Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and a bevy of top Russian defense and intelligence officials to Baghdad to meet today with top Yugoslav officials. The... MORE

Russian officials yesterday vehemently denied a U.S. magazine report alleging that, in 1997, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov had accepted a US$800,000 payment from the Iraqi government. In the article, which appears in the latest issue of the "New Yorker," Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh quotes... MORE

The Supreme Court of Tajikistan on March 26 sentenced to death three United Opposition fighters who were found guilty of assassinating four staffers of the United Nations Mission of Observers in Tajikistan (UNMOT). The victims were a Polish officer, an Uruguayan officer, a Japanese political... MORE