Pakistan's Oil and Gas Ministry announced yesterday that the U.S. company UNOCAL and the Taliban authorities of Afghanistan are finalizing an agreement to lay a gas export pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. UNOCAL leads a consortium that also includes... MORE

In a January 26 radio broadcast, Latvian president Guntis Ulmanis accused Prime Minister Guntars Krasts of "wasting the opportunity" to improve relations with Russia during last week's Riga conference of the prime ministers of Baltic Sea countries. Ulmanis singled out Krasts' failure to arrange a... MORE

"Chechnya is a territory on which Russian legislation is not in force. Almost one in ten of all murders is committed here, as are two-thirds of all acts of terrorism, and one-fifth of all bandit raids and kidnappings in the Northern Caucasus," Interior Minister Anatoly... MORE

About 6,000 took part in the first protest meeting in the North Caucasus republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia on January 23. The meeting, held in the republic's capital of Cherkessk, called on President Boris Yeltsin to dismiss the head of the republic administration, Vladimir Khubiev, and to... MORE

Russia's justice minister said yesterday that President Boris Yeltsin had placed the country's border guards under the control of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). (AP, January 27) If true, the move would greatly expand the powers of the FSB, which is responsible for domestic... MORE

The possibility of a coalition government is currently a subject of intense speculation in the Russian media. Russian president Boris Yeltsin has said that he is not interested in the idea "at the moment," but he has encouraged leaders of the Communist-dominated Duma to submit... MORE

The Iraq crisis remained in the headlines yesterday as a Russian diplomat launched talks in Baghdad while Russia and the United States held high level consultations on the issue. Russian special envoy Viktor Posuvalyuk was dispatched to the Persian Gulf on January 26 by Boris... MORE

Konstantin Zatulin, director of the Russian government-sponsored research institute on CIS countries, yesterday described Kazakhstan's policies as unfriendly to Russia. He faulted those policies for "seeking counterweights to Russia by maintaining especially warm relations with the United States, by its growing ties to China, and... MORE

The National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) reconvened in Dushanbe on January 23 and 26, as the government promised to seriously address the opposition's complaints against violations of key terms of the June 1997 peace agreements. The opposition had on January 15 withdrawn in protest from the... MORE

A court in the city of Neftekamsk in Bashkortostan on the Volga has ordered the closure of what is said to be the republic's sole surviving independent newspaper, Vecherny Neftekamsk. The Russian-language newspaper has seven days in which to appeal against the ruling to Bashkortostan's... MORE