A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said yesterday that Moscow has repeatedly called upon authorities in Iraq to comply with UN Security Council resolutions, but that Russia nevertheless continues to oppose any use of force in order to compel compliance by Baghdad. According to Gennady Tarasov,... MORE

Valery Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnology in Moscow, strongly opposes the inclusion of national identity in Russia's new passports. Ethnic identity is a matter of individual self-identification, he argues; in a democracy, it is improper for the state to intervene in such a... MORE

Tatarstan's parliament met yesterday to debate the question of Russia's new passports. There has been a strong protest in Tatarstan and other national republics over the fact that the new identity documents are written in Russian only, contain no entry for nationality, and are stamped... MORE

Boris Gryaznov, general director of Sovincentr, was shot dead in his car in Moscow yesterday evening. Sovincentr runs the Moscow World Trade Center, located close to the Russian White House in the center of the city. (Russian TV, November 13) Chubais "Nervous" in Wake of... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin has sacked the first deputy head of his presidential administration, Aleksandr Kazakov. (Itar-Tass, November 14) No reason has been given for the dismissal, but Kazakov (who is also chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom) is one of a number of... MORE

The Russian Duma yesterday rejected a government-sponsored bill that would have abolished 16 federal, regional, and local taxes not included in the tax code under discussion by a joint government/parliament conciliation commission. (Itar-Tass, November 13) General Director of Moscow Trade Center Murdered.

November 6 set a political precedent in Kazakhstan. In the unpromising setting of a drab room in Almaty's crumbling House of Democracy, Murat Auezov, one of the troika of the opposition movement Azamat, announced at an impromptu press conference that he would be opposing President... MORE

Harsh anti-dumping duties levied by the Department of Commerce, which had threatened to choke off Ukrainian steel exports to the U.S., were finally terminated in late October. By dint of an agreement approved by the U.S. and Ukrainian governments in late September (which was itself... MORE

Mikhail Fradkov, Russia's minister for foreign economic relations and trade, yesterday had some good things to say about the country's weapons exports. They grew by 65 percent in 1995, and another 18 percent in 1996, he said, reaching a value of $3.6 billion. This gives... MORE

Diplomatic maneuvering among Asian-Pacific powers has continued at a frenetic pace over the past few days, as Russian president Boris Yeltsin followed summit talks in Beijing with a visit to the Chinese city of Harbin, while Chinese prime minister Li Peng and Russian foreign minister... MORE