Abkhaz leader Vladislav Ardzinba received on December 10 in Sukhumi the newly appointed "plenipotentiary representative of the Chechen republic-Ichkeria" to Abkhazia, Ruslan Tuntaev. The envoy was appointed by Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov with a mandate to handle "economic and cultural-humanitarian affairs," political affairs were not... MORE

The First Deputy Commander of Russia's border troops, Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Manilov, and the commander of the Caucasus Border Troop District, Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Bolkhovitin, have openly come out against a political agreement to defuse a Russian-Georgian border incident. Russian deputy prime minister Valery Serov... MORE

After seven years of steep decline, Russian defense plants have regrouped and are now poised to seek new markets for their products, civil and military. This was the main conclusion of a talk by Julian Cooper, a professor at England's Birmingham University, at Harvard on... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin has approved a concept that will turn Russia's border troops from a military structure into a special federal service, the chief of the border troops, Gen. Andrei Nikolaev, announced in Moscow on December 10. With some 220,000 troops, the Federal Border Service... MORE

Russian Communist Party (CPRF) leader Gennady Zyuganov raised eyebrows this week when he told a meeting of Cossack atamans that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had never been a true political party. The CPRF regards itself as the successor of the CPSU,... MORE

First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais made fresh enemies this week when the commission he heads froze the assets of two large Russian oil refineries. Chairing a December 8 meeting of the President's Temporary Emergency Commission for Improving Fiscal and Budgetary Discipline, Chubais ordered the... MORE

According to reports in the Russian media, the government has decided not to proceed at present with its request to four leading western banks (Chase Manhattan, Salomon Brothers, CS First Boston, and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell) for an emergency loan to help it bridge its present... MORE

The International Monetary Fund announced this morning that it has decided to release the latest quarterly tranche of its $10.2 billion loan to Russia which it suspended in October. The Fund's mission in Moscow said it is now satisfied with Russia's budgetary policy. (BBC, December... MORE

Russia's stock market fell a further eight percentage points yesterday despite denials by President Boris Yeltsin's press spokesman and by his heart surgeon that the president is suffering from anything more serious than a cold. In an effort to allay public fears, Russian Television yesterday... MORE

President Yeltsin is expected to vote on Sunday, December 14, in elections for the Moscow City Duma. He will probably do so in the sanitarium, however, not in the glare of public attention. Moscow's legislative elections are important not only because Moscow is Russia's richest... MORE