At the Moscow summit, Ukraine and Moldova applied for and received the status of observer countries in the EAEC. Kyiv and Chisinau, however, hold very dissimilar views of the EAEC. Ukraine has no intention of becoming a member, and is having acrimonious differences with Russia... MORE

The United States and Russia announced unexpectedly yesterday that Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin will indeed have an arms control agreement to sign when the two hold summit talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg later this month. The hastiness of the announcements, however,... MORE

In response to President Vladimir Putin's repeated complaints that the government's economic growth forecasts for the next four to five years are insufficiently ambitious, the Ministry of Trade and Economic Development has apparently raised its projected gross domestic product numbers. The business newspaper Vedomosti reported... MORE

Chechen rebels have reportedly executed the person allegedly responsible for assassinating Khattab, the Saudi-born Chechen rebel field commander. Kavkaz.org, the website connected to the radical Islamist wing of the Chechen resistance, posted a report yesterday claiming that the rebels had uncovered the identities of three... MORE

On May 13 in Moscow, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbaev signed what is being presented as a legally binding document on dividing the northern and northeastern Caspian seabed between Russia and Kazakhstan. The document, which took almost three years to negotiate, has the form... MORE

A day after Russia and the United States announced a potentially historic strategic arms reduction accord (see the Monitor, May 14), foreign ministers from Russia and NATO countries meeting in Iceland yesterday said that they had clinched a cooperation agreement of equal magnitude. In a... MORE

Despite recent steps by the Russian military leadership ostensibly aimed at reducing human rights abuses by federal forces in Chechnya, the head of a leading Russian human rights group yesterday painted a grim picture of the human rights situation in the breakaway republic. Oleg Orlov,... MORE

On May 13-14 in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin made his clearest and most purposeful attempt to date at forming a post-Soviet, Russian-led military-political alliance. Chairing a summit of the six member countries of the CIS Collective Security Treaty (CST), Putin initiated the CST's upgrading into... MORE

The Russian authorities have accused an Islamic separatist guerrilla leader of masterminding last week's terrorist bombing in Kaspiisk, Dagestan, and detained three men they accuse of having directly carried out the attack. The death toll from that blast, which took place during a May 9... MORE

Against the backdrop of the Kaspiisk terrorist attack, a trial begins today (May 13) in Pyatigorsk, Stavropol Krai, of seventeen men belonging to what investigators are calling a "Wahhabi underground," which allegedly plotted to seize power in Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria last summer. Citing information from... MORE