The Russian ambassador in Chisinau, Aleksandr Papkin, considers that the OSCE's year-end resolution on Moldova permits Russia to maintain an open-ended military presence in that country. According to Papkin, speaking in a local press interview, the OSCE meeting last week agreed that Russian "peacekeeping" troops... MORE

Russia's Federation Council Chairman Yegor Stroev yesterday offered the unprecedented admission that "the CIS as such does not exist. It is only an outward form." To predict its prospects, he said, is "to gaze into the coffee dregs." Stroev, who chairs the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly... MORE

Russia and North Korea are reportedly on the verge of signing a new interstate treaty to replace the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed by Pyongyang and the Soviet Union in 1961. In 1995 Russia declared the older treaty invalid on the grounds... MORE

Like other members of the UN Security Council, Moscow has repeatedly called for Iraq to live up to its international obligations and cooperate fully with UN weapons inspectors. But, in the scarcely veiled subtext of Russian policy on Iraq, Moscow has joined with Baghdad in... MORE

Over the past several days, to the surprise of no one, Russian political leaders have urged the UN Security Council both to launch a quick review of Iraq's compliance with disarmament resolutions and to lift international sanctions on Baghdad as soon as possible. These exhortations... MORE

There have been, of course, a host of interpretations of--and commentary about--Yeltsin's shake-up. Mikhail Yurev, deputy speaker of the State Duma and a member of the Yabloko faction, said Yeltsin's aim was to counter the growing influence of the Communist Party over the policies of... MORE

Yuri Luzhkov said he approved of Yeltsin's shake-up. "The previous administration was very closely connected to Boris Berezovsky, and in this sense the president's decision was very useful," stated the Moscow mayor, who is not a big fan of Berezovsky, the CIS executive secretary and... MORE

Russia's political elite and media were focused today on President Boris Yeltsin's decision to fire the heads of his administration. Yesterday, the Russian head of state returned to the Kremlin from the Central Clinical Hospital, where he was recuperating from pneumonia, in order to announce... MORE

The California-based UNOCAL Corporation has withdrawn from projects, worth an estimated US$8 billion, to lay gas and oil pipelines from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Indian Ocean. The company also closed its offices in three out of four Caspian and Central Asian... MORE

The OSCE's year-end meeting in Oslo ended anticlimactically, failing to generate progress toward a settlement of post-Soviet regional conflicts. Actual regression on the Karabakh conflict was avoided when the conferees did not insist on a "common state" of Azerbaijan and Karabakh as the basis for... MORE