The Verkhovna Rada yesterday ratified the set of three agreements on the basing of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine. The voting tally was 250 in favor (24 more than necessary), 63 opposed, and the balance to 450 either not attending, not voting, or abstaining.... MORE

On March 23 Premier Valery Pustovoytenko announced the introduction of a "special economic management" plan for the Ukrainian government, to go into effect on April 1, with the goal of paying the country's huge and growing wage and pension arrears. It seems a valiant but... MORE

Latvia's National Security Council yesterday narrowly endorsed Lainis Kamaldins for another four-year term as director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (OPC), the country's top internal security post. The senior governing party, Latvia's Way, successfully pushed through the renomination despite Kamaldins' poor... MORE

Swiss Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte left Russia yesterday quietly, and a number of media today emphasized the fact that she apparently did not bring to Russia stacks of "kompromat" (compromising materials) concerning top Russian officials, as had been expected. Del Ponte held more than ten... MORE

Estonian President Lennart Meri was awarded the title "European of the Year" at a ceremony on March 23 in Paris. In his address on the occasion, Meri pointed to three old notions, "long dead in Europe, but which live on in Russia" and affect its... MORE

Some observers are speculating that the NATO bombardment of Serbia and Kosovo could, ironically, facilitate an agreement between Russian and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The theory is that an IMF agreement would assuage Moscow's anger over NATO's action in the former Yugoslavia. This theory... MORE

Amid the protestations out of Moscow, Clinton administration officials yesterday tried both to reassure the Russian leadership and to downplay the impact of the NATO air strikes on Russian-U.S. relations. With the former goal in mind, U.S. President Bill Clinton yesterday reportedly conducted a thirty-five-minute... MORE

The reaction in the Russian press today to last night's NATO airstrikes was, not surprisingly, highly critical. One front-page article in a Russian daily was headlined: "The NATO bloc has brought Europe to war: Up to the last minute, the inhabitants of Europe believed that... MORE

Amid reports that Russia would put its military forces on heightened alert in the event of NATO air attacks on Serbia, there were also suggestions that Moscow might reconsider its observance of the UN arms embargo on Yugoslavia. During a television interview on March 23,... MORE

Russian government officials reacted with predictable fury yesterday as NATO launched air strikes aimed at weakening Serbian military forces and forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table. In Moscow, an angry President Boris Yeltsin denounced the NATO action, calling it a "strike against... MORE