In an address to the country on June 15 and a conference with ambassadors of great powers yesterday, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze has announced a four-pronged initiative to jump-start negotiations on Abkhazia. Tbilisi proposes negotiations on the following parallel tracks: in the UN Security Council,... MORE

President Saparmurat Niazov yesterday confirmed the results of two recent international tenders for Turkmen offshore oil and gas fields. Mobil Oil of the United States is the winner of the tender for the Serdar field, whose recoverable reserves are variously estimated at 50-200 million tons... MORE

On the eve of critical talks between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, sparring between Russia and the West over policy toward Kosovo appeared to intensify yesterday. The immediate cause of tensions was a NATO air exercise in the skies... MORE

A Russian-Cypriot missile deal was back in the news yesterday as Turkish authorities said they had found seven mobile missile launch pads aboard a cargo ship stopped and inspected as it was entering the Dardanelles Strait. The officials reportedly suspect that the components might be... MORE

Russian presidential spokesman and foreign policy adviser Sergei Yastrzhembsky held talks in Pretoria yesterday with top South African officials, including the country's vice president and foreign minister. Yastrzhembsky's arrival in South Africa followed several days of talks in the African nation of Namibia, where, on... MORE

Colonel General Anatoly Kornukov--appointed last December to head the new unified Military Air Force being formed by the merger of the former Air and Air Defense Forces--held a news conference early last week in which he gave a status report on his command. He announced... MORE

Our position is unchanged--we prepare for NATO membership... Lithuania has the right to join the military alliance of its choice," Defense Minister Ceslovas Stankevicius stated yesterday. Stankevicius spoke in the wake of Yevgeny Primakov's visit to Vilnius, where the Russian Foreign Minister held out the... MORE

Belarusan officials announced yesterday that President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been elected honorary chairman of the Committee of the Union of Slavic States. According to the officials, the Committee was formed during an All-Slavic Congress held in Prague at the end of May. Apparently attended by... MORE

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma discussed with Estonian Foreign Minister Toomas Ilves in Kyiv the proposal to create a transit corridor that would unite the Caspian, Black, and Baltic seas. A transit route for Caspian oil to Europe via Ukraine, proposed recently by Kyiv, would be... MORE

The naval exercise Cooperative Partner 98 began yesterday in Romanian territorial waters and in international waters of the northwestern Black Sea. Held in the framework of NATO's Partnership for Peace program, the exercise involves some thirty-five warships, aircraft and troops of the United States, Germany,... MORE