Addressing the meeting of foreign ministers of the OSCE countries yesterday, Boris Tarasyuk expressed Ukraine's concern over the absence of progress toward settling the Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdniester conflicts. The OSCE ought to focus on those areas and apply its conflict-resolution mechanisms there,... MORE

Vyacheslav Chornovil and Viktor Pynzenyk, the leaders of the Rukh (Ukraine's largest right-wing force) and of Reforms and Order (the party of nationally minded liberal reformers) yesterday proclaimed the creation of a political bloc. The two parties plan to form a coalition of right-of-center forces... MORE

Chechnya's Supreme Sharia Court has postponed carrying out its sentence against field commander Salman Raduev until he undergoes a medical examination (Nezavisimaya gazeta, November 27). The court last month sentenced Raduev to four years' imprisonment for an attempt by his forces last May to seize... MORE

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov used a meeting of the fifty-four-nation OSCE in Oslo yesterday to renew Moscow's attacks both on NATO's security role in Europe and on parallel proposals for the Western alliance to expand the scope of its activities. In remarks to the... MORE

Panov's remarks in Tokyo yesterday appeared to be designed to lower Japanese expectations as the two sides prepare for a new round of negotiations on both the peace treaty and the territorial row. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin is scheduled to arrive in Tokyo... MORE

In remarks to reporters in Tokyo yesterday, Russia's ambassador to Japan appeared to set out explicitly a policy toward the Kuril Islands territorial dispute which, until now, Russian leaders have largely only hinted at. Aleksandr Panov bluntly told the Kyodo news service that Russia and... MORE

The warming relations between ROH and Otechestvo would appear to deal yet another blow to the Gaidar-Chubais coalition, which had been counting on an alliance with ROH. This comes on the heels of yesterday's rumor that former Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko was in negotiations with... MORE

Otechestvo, the centrist bloc formed last month by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, appears to be gaining momentum. In a newspaper interview published today, Aleksandr Shokhin, who leads the Russia is Our Home (ROH) faction in the State Duma, outlined various possible forms of cooperation between... MORE

In an interview with Armenia's three leading television channels, President Robert Kocharian hailed the OSCE mediators' new position on Karabakh as a "victory of common sense." Kocharian singled out for praise the principle of a "common state" of Azerbaijan and Karabakh, which forms the basis... MORE

The sixth congress of the Democratic Party of Ukraine (DPU) has ended in a virtual split, with 182 out of some 400 delegates refusing to reelect Volodymyr Yavorivsky as the party's leader, and no official documents approved. The "rebels," representing regional organizations, supported Anna Antoneva--the... MORE