On January 14-15 in Warsaw Presidents Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine and Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland conferred on bilateral cooperation projects and on their countries' relations with the European Union (EU), of which Poland is a prospective full member. The presidents agreed to finalize the plan... MORE

The ambassadors of European Union member and candidate countries returned to Minsk yesterday, seven months after President Alyaksandr Lukashenka evicted them from their residences and their governments recalled them in protest. The evictions, which violated international conventions on the immunity of diplomatic missions, had triggered... MORE

The ambassadors returning to Belarus found a tense political situation there. Addressing a special session of the country's Academy of Sciences on January 15, Lukashenka protested vigorously against the market mechanisms of price formation, vowing that the state will set prices in Belarus. Ignoring, or... MORE

On January 15 Russian lawmakers continued to criticize the Clinton administration for its decision to impose sanctions on three Russian institutions alleged to be leaking missile and nuclear technology to Iran. Russia's lower house of parliament--the State Duma--unanimously approved a statement expressing the lawmakers' "indignation... MORE

UN Security Council members remained deeply divided over the weekend despite a trio of proposals offered late last week aimed at forging a new consensus on policy toward Iraq in the wake of last month's U.S. and British air strikes (see the Monitor, January 15).... MORE

Anticipating Yeltsin's latest illness, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov criticized Yeltsin on January 15 for not fulfilling his duties, saying that Russia "should have an active president" and was having "big problems" as a result. Luzhkov said that if a leader has persistent health problems which... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin was taken to the Central Clinical Hospital yesterday, where he was diagnosed with an acute bleeding stomach ulcer. In a late night interview with Yevgeny Kiselev, host of "Itogi," NTV television's weekly news analysis program, presidential spokesman Dmitri Yakushkin said that Yeltsin's... MORE

A number of leading Russian political analysts weighed in yesterday about the impact of Yeltsin's illness on the "correlation of forces" in Russia's high politics. The heads of two private thinktanks--Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies, and Georgy Satarov, president of the... MORE

President Nursultan Nazarbaev, 58, who has just been reelected to a seven-year term of office (see the Monitor, January 8, 12), already seems to be planning to prolong his presidency by a further term from 2006 onward. Nazarbaev's lieutenant Sergey Tereshchenko, who headed the president's... MORE

Two high-speed patrol cutters of the Royal Navy arrived at Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti on January 12, to be handed over to Georgia's coastal guard in a ceremony on January 14. British instructors will train the Georgian crews of these vessels, the latest... MORE