President Vladimir Putin fired Railways Minister Nikolai Aksenenko yesterday (January 3). According to the version of events put out by the government and presidential press services, Putin signed a decree removing Aksenenko as head of the Railways Ministry (MPS) at the urging of Prime Minister... MORE

On December 29 in Yerevan, Defense Minister Serge Sarkisian and Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov finalized the first list of Armenian enterprises to be handed over to Russia, as part of a debt settlement scheme. The list includes the Hrazdan thermal power plant--Armenia's largest--as... MORE

A late December visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Britain capped off what many analysts believe has been a highly successful year for Russian diplomacy. The visit, which marked the fifth meeting between Putin and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2001 and their... MORE

The arrival of the New Year has seen a new round of claims and counterclaims by the Chechen rebels and the federal forces fighting them about troop losses and civilian casualties. Aleksandr Potapov, deputy head of the Federal Security Service's department for Chechnya, claimed today... MORE

On December 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a policy initiative designed to create a controllable level of ethno-linguistic tension in the Baltic states. In a live phone-in show, broadcast on all of Russia's state television and radio channels, Putin urged Russians and "Russian-speakers" in... MORE

Ukraine's Constitutional Court seems to have given the country's communists something of a New Year's present. On December 29, chief judge Viktor Skomorokha announced the court verdict annulling the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) decisions that in turn temporarily banned the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) on... MORE

On December 27, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma replaced his finance minister. Outgoing is Ihor Mityukov, 49. Incoming is Ihor Yushko, 40. The official explanation for the change is that Mityukov did not measure up in his budget and tax planning. The draft tax code, which... MORE

Human rights groups have again raised alarms regarding the Kremlin's continued spotty rights record following the conclusion of a pair of spy trials that took place in Russia last week. One of the trials, held on December 25, saw Igor Sutyagin, a 36-year-old defense analyst... MORE

As 2001 came to a close, TV-6, Russia's only remaining large independent national television network, won what amounts to a stay of execution. On December 29, the Federal Arbitration Court of the Moscow District overturned a November decision by the Moscow Arbitration Court liquidating TV-6's... MORE

Acting on French and Canadian requests, Kyrgyzstan has entered into agreements with those two countries on the use of its territory by their air forces. The two agreements, signed during the last days of December, are in the form of notes exchanged by the Kyrgyz... MORE