A senior Interior Ministry official said yesterday that Russia's murder rate is the world's second highest, behind South Africa's. General-Major Vladimir Gordienko, deputy head of the ministry's main criminal investigation department, told reporters that more than 22,500 murders were committed during the first eight months... MORE

On September 29 in Baku, Georgia and Azerbaijan signed a package of agreements on the sale and transport of natural gas from Azerbaijan's offshore Shah-Deniz field to Turkey via Georgia. Presidents Eduard Shevardnadze and Haidar Aliev, along with Georgia's International Oil Corporation chief Giorgi Chanturia... MORE

As any number of commentators have observed over the past two weeks, the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the Bush administration's resulting drive to forge a broad, international antiterrorist coalition has presented Russia with a wide array of potential diplomatic benefits--and... MORE

On September 25, the Democratic Party of Russia (DPR)--founded in 1990 by Nikolai Travkin, one of the leading lights of the perestroika period--held its fifteenth congress. Today, Travkin is a member of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) faction in the State Duma. Meanwhile, the... MORE

The September 23 race for the governorship of Rostov Oblast in southern Russia was won last week by Vladimir Chub, who won 79 percent of the vote. His only opponent, Petr Voloshin, a local oblast government official, won 7.5 percent (Russian agencies, September 24-26). There... MORE

On September 25, the political party Labor Ukraine publicized results of the U.S. investigation into the murder of Ukrainian opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze. Gongadze disappeared in September last year, and his mutilated body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November. The U.S. detective... MORE

In a week of frenetic, global diplomatic maneuvering driven by the Bush administration's urgent efforts to build an international coalition against terrorism, the potential for greatly increased cooperation between Russia and the United States--and, indeed, between Russia and the West more generally--was nowhere better illustrated... MORE

Since Putin's September 24 speech announcing Russia's willingness to work with the United States and the West, there has been endless speculation in the media regarding what Moscow may be looking to get in return for this cooperation. In comments to the press, Wolfowitz suggested... MORE

The situation in Chechnya has considerably worsened following the passing of President Vladimir Putin's seventy-two-hour deadline for rebels to lay down their arms. The rebel leadership, perhaps operating on the assumption that the federal forces are planning a massive attack on rebel positions in the... MORE

Despite the upsurge in fighting in Chechnya, there is still debate in Russia over what President Vladimir Putin intended when he gave the rebels seventy-two hours to appear before federal officials and begin a process of disarmament. His aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky and other Russian officials... MORE