Carla Del Ponte, Switzerland's top prosecutor, is due to arrive in Moscow today for what should prove to be a controversial visit. Until late yesterday there were doubts about whether the visit would in fact take place. A Swiss embassy official in Moscow told the... MORE

Late this morning, Moscow time, Russian media reported that officials of the Russian Prosecutor General's office had seized documents from the Kremlin's "housekeeping affairs" department, headed by Pavel Borodin, a veteran member of President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle. According to the reports, prosecutors began confiscating... MORE

In a March 19 briefing, Georgian Foreign Minister Irakly Menagarishvili singled out two aspects of Georgia's foreign and security policy. First, he described the CIS Collective Security Treaty as "absolutely ineffective, at variance with present realities, signed in and made for another era." Georgia will... MORE

On 19-20 March, the high-ranking loyalists of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma gathered at the founding congress of the Zlahoda (Accord) Association--an amorphous centrist political organization apparently set to oppose both the "red" forces and radical reforms. Attendees included ministers, leaders of pro-presidential political parties and... MORE

Yesterday a bomb exploded in Djohar, the Chechen capital, in an apparent attempt on the life of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, the fifth such attempt since he became president. A bomb, apparently a radio-controlled device, went off as Maskhadov's motorcade passed by. Maskhadov was not... MORE

Lainis Kamaldins, Director of Latvia's Office for the Protection of the Constitution (OPC), met on March 19 with Chief Rabbi Natans Barkans and Jewish Community Chairman Grigory Krupnikov. Kamaldins, the country's top internal security official, expressed "regret for the ill-considered remarks" he had just made... MORE

The death toll in the March 19 bombing of a market in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, was lowered over the weekend from sixty-two to an official fifty-one. This figure may change yet again. More than 100 people were injured, some of them seriously.... MORE

Mayorsky also argued that the peace settlement agreement as signed by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian negotiators has no legal force. That argument appeared to be based on three factors. First, because the Serbs had not also signed it. And second, because Russia--as one of the mediating... MORE

A top Russian diplomat was quoted on March 18 as saying that Serb negotiators at peace talks in France had acted in an unconstructive fashion when they refused last week to sign even the political portion of a Western brokered peace agreement. The comments by... MORE

Reports in the Russian media, citing unnamed Federation Council sources, have already circulated that Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov would again ask to be relieved of his official duties (Russian agencies, March 19). This may, however, have been Kremlin spin. On the other hand, some observers... MORE