Beijing yesterday strongly protested the killing of two Chinese fishermen earlier this week by Russian border forces. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the action was "incompatible with good neighborly and friendly relations between China and Russia." The spokesman also said that the fishermen... MORE

Russia's new Interior Minister, Sergei Stepashin, has signed an agreement on fighting crime with Chechnya's new Minister of Shari'ah National Security, Abu Movsaev. Both men are new brooms. Stepashin, seen as a hawk on the Chechen question since his 1994/95 stint as head of the... MORE

On a two-day visit to Kyiv, Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov reviewed with President Leonid Kuchma, Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk and other Ukrainian leaders the full range of unresolved bilateral problems. -- Unratified interstate treaty and Black Sea Fleet agreements. At Primakov's insistence, Kuchma agreed... MORE

The Ukrainian-Polish-British military exercise Cossack Steppe culminated on May 27 at Britain's Stanford Training Area near Norfolk. Some 200 crack troops of the three countries staged a offensive operation--capture of a fortified village--as part of an intensive tactical training program. This final phase had been... MORE

Azerbaijan marked yesterday the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which existed for two years before being conquered by Soviet Russia. Addressing a special session of the Milli Majlis on the eve of the anniversary, President Haidar Aliev described today's independent... MORE

The Contact Group of countries and international organizations supervising pacification in Tajikistan failed this week to remove the latest stumbling block Dushanbe threw against the political settlement. In violation of earlier agreements, the Tajik parliament invalidated the appointment of opposition leaders Akbar Turajonzoda and Dovlat... MORE

On May 20, Kairbek Suleimenov, Kazakhstan's Interior Minister, has pledged to step up the fight against organized crime and police corruption. (Kazakh TV Xabar [Astana], May 20; Panorama [Almaty], May 22) In the first press conference held by the Ministry for several months, Suleimenov said... MORE

Speaking on Russian television this morning, President Boris Yeltsin said there was no cause to panic over the country's financial crisis. He insisted that Moscow has enough reserves to support the ruble and that there will be no devaluation of the currency. Yeltsin spoke after... MORE

The crisis is one of confidence. Russian government spokesmen insist that there are no structural reasons for the crisis and point out that the basic principles of national economic policy remain unchanged. Last year, the economy showed its first signs of growth since the reforms... MORE

As welcome as the Norwegian offer to provide some US$30 million towards cleaning up the nuclear waste from Russian Northern Fleet nuclear submarines might be, it does not begin to address the problem. What Boris Yeltsin might mean when he suggested the Kola Peninsula and... MORE