President Boris Yeltsin is meeting today with leaders of all the factions of the Duma in an effort to persuade opposition leaders to call off a no-confidence vote scheduled for tomorrow. After an eleventh-hour appeal from Yeltsin, the Communists and their nationalist and agrarian allies... MORE

President Nursultan Nazarbaev yesterday postponed from October 23 to December 10 the transfer of Kazakhstan's capital from Almaty to Akmola; the official inauguration of the new capital has been put back to June 10, 1998. Akmola is not yet ready to accommodate the government, Nazarbaev... MORE

Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze said yesterday that the four warships Russia has agreed to provide the Georgian Navy would not make up for the vast amount of former Soviet military equipment that Moscow had withdrawn from Georgia. Shevardnadze charged that no other former republic had... MORE

Lt. Gen. Viktor Zavarzin has been named as the first Russian military representative at NATO headquarters in Brussels. From January 1996 until April of this year he commanded the CIS joint peacekeeping forces in Tajikistan. He then became a deputy chief of staff on the... MORE

There was another problem aboard Russia's troubled Mir space station yesterday as two Russian cosmonauts were unable fully to complete a rewiring job in the station's airless Spektr module, despite nearly seven hours of effort. The ship's commander complained that Russian ground control had sent... MORE

Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov will follow up the November 1-2 meeting between President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto with a visit to Japan on November 14. According to government sources in Tokyo, the Japanese government hopes to hold a "continuous political dialogue"... MORE

President Mintimer Shaimiev of Tatarstan says his republic may decide to issue its own passports, the Monitor's correspondent in the Volga region reports. Shaimiev says that feelings in the republic are running high because of the decision to omit the section relating to nationality from... MORE

Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin approved on October 15 a deal which allows the auto giant AvtoVAZ to pay off its tax arrears over 10 years. The firm owes 2.9 trillion rubles to the federal government and 1.8 trillion to Samara oblast, and will have to... MORE

Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov ruffled some feathers in Russia's high command on October 17 when he blamed "the military" for the murder three years ago of Dmitry Kholodov, a journalist for the newspaper Moskovsky komsomolets. Kholodov was investigating corruption in the former Soviet Union's Western... MORE

Russia and France found new diplomatic common ground late last week (see item below) when they joined together to oppose a U.S.-British effort to increase UN sanctions on Iraq. The move by Washington and London follows a recent report by the UN's chief weapons inspector... MORE