Russia's lower house of parliament moved yesterday to delay once again consideration of the START II strategic arms reduction treaty--this time until at least early spring of next year. The decision was not unexpected. Russian lawmakers last week said that they would take START II... MORE

Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov wound up a two-day visit to India yesterday, during which the two countries signed a package of bilateral accords and pledged next year to sign a wide-ranging "strategic partnership" agreement. Primakov was standing in for Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose... MORE

Anonymous law enforcement officials told the Russian agencies news agency yesterday that investigators looking into last month's murder of Democratic Russia leader Galina Starovoitova are considering two possible "versions"--one political, the other "commercial." Ruslan Linkov, Starovoitova's deputy, who was seriously wounded in the attack which... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin held a meeting today in the Kremlin with Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin, during which he castigated Russia's top police official for having painted too rosy a picture of the crime situation in Russia. Yeltsin said while some law enforcement statistics had claimed... MORE

The government of Kyrgyzstan resigned yesterday after President Askar Akaev pronounced it incapable of working. It was the National Security Council which formally made the decision to dismiss the government upon the president's proposal, and after rejecting Prime Minister Kubanychbek Zhumaliev's activity report. The decision... MORE

In a statement yesterday, the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan expressed concern over "Russia's growing military presence in Armenia" and "continuing Russian arms deliveries, leading to a quantitative and qualitative upgrade of the Russian-Armenian group of forces." According to the statement, Russian forces in Armenia pose... MORE

Open, friendly, comradely" was the Kremlin's official description of President Boris Yeltsin's December 17 meeting with his Belarusan counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka. That adjectival crescendo with its Soviet-era coda turned to diminuendo two days later when the first deputy chief of Russia's presidential administration, Oleg Sysuev,... MORE

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office has officially requested the parliament to remove the deputy immunity which Ukraine's former premier, now leader of the Hromada party and faction, Pavlo Lazarenko, now has. Prosecutor General Mykhaylo Potebenko announced this on December 21, saying that the prosecution has... MORE

Some of the leaders of Latvia's Way (LW), the party which heads a recently formed minority government, seem to be charting an uncertain path in internal and external policies. Although classified as a "right-of-center" party, LW has rejected the cooperation of the conservative election winner,... MORE

In his television interview Ivanov also underscored a point at the forefront of Moscow's criticisms of the strikes on Iraq. That is, that the air strikes are dangerous not only in themselves, but also insofar as they set a precedent for responses to future international... MORE