The Balance-Kayak-98 military exercise of U.S. special forces and Kazakh paratroopers began on June 6 at a military base near Almaty. According to Kazakhstan's deputy chief of staff for operational planning, Colonel Saken Zhanuzakov, the exercise focuses on joint peacekeeping operations. It consists of a... MORE

At a trial in Tashkent, the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan on June 5 sentenced five residents of Namangan to ten years imprisonment each, and two others to six years each. The charges included fanning religious and ethnic strife, conspiracy against the constitutional order with a... MORE

Russia's Central Bank is lowering the annual refinancing rate to 60 percent as of today. (RTR, June 4) On May 27, the Bank had raised the rate to 150 percent in a determined effort to ward off speculation against the ruble. For the time being... MORE

Russian President Boris Yeltsin yesterday returned to parliament a new land code approved by both houses. His reason: It blocks the creation of a free market. The Kremlin said Yeltsin had written to the heads of both chambers explaining that he would not sign the... MORE

The Military Collegium of Russia's Supreme Court has rejected a plea for the rehabilitation of Nikolai Yezhov, Soviet police chief who headed the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1936-38 and whose name is synonymous with some of the worst years of Stalin's terror.... MORE

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P-5), meeting yesterday in Geneva, managed to produce a statement urging India and Pakistan to step back from the brink of a nuclear arms race. Neither incentives nor sanctions aimed at moving the two countries toward... MORE

The Latvian parliament resolved yesterday to consider the amendments to the citizenship law according to the normal procedure--which involves three readings, as opposed to an accelerated procedure which would have required a final decision yesterday. Following this decision, the parliament took up the amendments in... MORE

A Russian Defense Ministry delegation has reportedly returned very satisfied from a six-day visit to South Korea that concluded earlier this week. The Russian group was headed by First Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Mikhailov and was said to have included--"unofficially"--representatives of the Russian state arms... MORE

The government of Belarus aims to achieve in the year 2001 the level of economic development and social protection of Soviet times," Prime Minister Syarhey Linh proclaimed yesterday at an international conference in Minsk. The government will use planning and regulation of the economy, rejecting... MORE

By a margin of 296 to 26, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a resolution yesterday instructing the government to allocate an additional 600 million hryvnyas in state support for the coal sector from the state budget. The budget had already set aside 1.5 billion hryvnyas to... MORE