After months of delay, Yeltsin yesterday signed a decree transferring responsibility for managing the criminal justice system from the Interior Ministry to the Justice Ministry, as of September 1. (Itar-Tass, July 29) Russia is obligated by its membership of the Council of Europe to transfer... MORE

A trial has begun in Moscow that has every chance of becoming not only unprecedented, but sensational as well. Beslan Gantemirov, former mayor of the Chechen capital, Grozny, is charged with swindling 57 billion rubles. During the war years, Gantemirov also held the post of... MORE

Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov has decided not to extend the curfew and state of emergency, which ran out at midnight July 28. He says significant progress has been made in stabilizing the situation in the republic, and that the goals set at the time of... MORE

The first ever exercises between the Russian and Japanese navies got underway in the Sea of Japan yesterday. The one-day drill, which took place some 250 miles east of Vladivostok, was a search and rescue exercise, involving three ships and seven aircraft from Japan's Maritime... MORE

Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Pastukhov held talks on July 28 and 29 in Baku with President Haidar Aliev and other Azerbaijani officials on defining the Caspian Sea's legal status. Pastukhov called for dividing the sea floor among riparian states along a negotiable "median... MORE

President Saparmurat Niazov and other Turkmen officials conferred on July 28 and 29 in Ashgabat with Richard Morningstar and Yaman Bashkut, special envoys of U.S. President Bill Clinton and Turkish President Suleyman Demirel, respectively. The envoys carried presidential messages on the evolving plan to pipe... MORE

Although Kazakhstan's 1997 oil extraction exceeded its 1996 level, production volumes in the refinery sector fell last year to around 83 percent of their 1996 levels. The contraction in oil refining exacerbates losses incurred by falling world oil prices. (Russian agencies, July 22 and 27)... MORE

In an official statement released to news agencies, Russia's Defense Ministry vowed yesterday to work with other government agencies both to ensure reliable and tougher control over the export of sensitive military technologies. The ministry would also do its part, the statement read, to improve... MORE

Nonproliferation issues and Russian-Iranian missile cooperation were only two of several topics discussed by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov during their meeting in Manila on the night of July 27. According to a senior U.S. official, the two... MORE

Following what appeared to be another concession from Seoul, Russia and South Korea have apparently settled their differences over a spy wrangle that had roiled bilateral relations for nearly a month. Following a meeting yesterday in Manila with South Korean Foreign Minister Park Chung-soo, Russian... MORE