Local authorities in Russia's Far Eastern Sakhalin region have interjected themselves into the national debate over policy toward the four south Kuril Islands sought by Japan. In a statement adopted by the Sakhalin regional legislature yesterday, lawmakers announced their opposition to any plans by the... MORE

Perhaps even more compelling than Koshel's arrest was a report yesterday by Russian agencies that officials of the Prosecutor General's Office last Monday (November 2) seized databases of the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, pursuant to a case involving the laundering of illegal revenues by top... MORE

Just days after Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky accused Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov's cabinet of being mired in corruption, officers from the Interior Ministry's anti-economic crime unit arrested Grigory Koshel, deputy board chairman of the powerful Oneksimbank, as he boarded a plane bound for a holiday... MORE

Russia joined with other UN Security Council members yesterday to approve a resolution which condemns Iraq's recent decision to halt cooperation with UN weapons inspectors as a "flagrant violation" of Baghdad's international obligations. The resolution, which also demanded an immediate reversal of Iraq's policy in... MORE

Government troops have landed from the air near Hujand and are also advancing on land toward that city, Tajikistan's second-largest, seized yesterday by rebels invading from Uzbekistan (see the Monitor, November 4). The government has issued an ultimatum demanding the rebels' surrender and reserving the... MORE

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma yesterday invited his Russian and Moldovan counterparts, Boris Yeltsin and Petru Lucinschi, OSCE Chairman-in-Office Bronislaw Geremek (who is also Poland's foreign minister) and Transdniester leader Igor Smirnov to meet in Kyiv in order to set the basic terms of a political... MORE

In parallel statements publicized yesterday, Georgia's Prosecutor-General Jamlet Babilashvili and Chief Military Prosecutor Badri Bitsadze offered a deal to the fugitive leaders of the abortive October 19 putsch. The statements urged Lieutenant-Colonel Akaki Eliava and his accomplices to turn themselves in and give full information... MORE

The saga of miners' protests, suspended from July, continued yesterday with over 1,000 miners marching along Kyiv's main thoroughfare and "burying" a coffin loaded with coal in a pedestrian subway, which was to symbolize death of the Ukrainian coal industry. The miners picketed the parliament... MORE

On November 3 Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov expressed what he suggested was Russia's bewilderment over Iraq's most recent decision to halt cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. In an interview broadcast by Russian television, Ivanov admitted that he found it "difficult to explain Baghdad's actions."... MORE

The European Commission (EC, the top executive organ of the European Union) yesterday issued an official recommendation against placing Latvia and Lithuania on the fast track to accession negotiations at this time. The EC "could envisage," it said, a recommendation to invite Latvia to those... MORE