Meeting in "extraordinary session" in Minsk yesterday, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Russia-Belarus Union failed in both its stated purposes: first, to pass the "Union" budget for 1999; and second, to adopt "priority measures" for implementing Presidents Boris Yeltsin's and Alyaksandr Lukashenka's December 25, 1998... MORE

Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon wound up a three-day visit to Moscow yesterday which produced neither agreements--none were expected--nor any evidence of significant movement in the two countries' often troubled bilateral relations. During his stay, Sharon held talks with a number of top Russian officials--including... MORE

Two announcements yesterday threw more water on flickering hopes that the State Duma might ratify the 1993 START II nuclear arms reduction treaty. The first was a statement by former general, Krasnoyarsk governor and presidential hopeful Aleksandr Lebed that ratification of the treaty would cause... MORE

In a matter-of-fact statement, the chief spokesman for the Strategic Missile Force announced yesterday that Russian early-warning sensors had that day both detected the launch of a Norwegian research ballistic missile and confirmed that the missile's trajectory posed no threat to Russia. A similar event... MORE

Another newspaper, "Komsomolskaya pravda" reported in yesterday's edition that Boris Berezovsky plans to create a CIS "antiterrorist" and "counterintelligence" center, directly subordinated to the CIS Executive Secretariat which he heads. The proposed center would "coordinate the efforts" of the CIS member countries' counterintelligence services. According... MORE

In a second controversy involving kompromat, the Moscow prosecutor's office has stated that it has no incriminating evidence against Aleksandr Shokhin concerning allegations that he was involved in the 1994 murder of alleged Moscow mafia kingpin Otari Kvantrishvili. Shokhin, former economics minister, is now a... MORE

Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov has unveiled a two-year plan for fighting crime and corruption in Russia. Addressing a meeting of the cabinet yesterday, Primakov said: "We will never get out of our sorry situation if we don't step up the fight against crime and corruption."... MORE

A spate of new accusations have recently circulated in the Russian press against Boris Berezovsky, the business tycoon who holds the post of Commonwealth of Independent States executive secretary. "Moskovsky komsomolets" published an article--written by one of its investigative reporters, Aleksandr Khinshtein on January 20--which... MORE

Two members of Ukraine's parliament, Yulia Tymoshenko and Oleksandr Turchynov, resigned yesterday from their positions as deputy heads of the Hromada party, accusing Hromada leader Pavlo Lazarenko, the former premier now under investigation in Switzerland, of authoritarianism. They objected more pointedly to Lazarenko's plan to... MORE

Liberal imperialism, a recurrent Russian phenomenon, came up yesterday with its own blueprint for merging Belarus with Russia. This plan is more centralist and even more constraining to Belarus than either the Kremlin or the Russian communist proposal. The plan was revealed following the leadership... MORE