Russian first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais was upbeat when he arrived in Hong Kong over the weekend to attend the annual gatherings of the IMF and the World Bank, which are taking place at the same time as a meeting of G-7 finance ministers.... MORE

A second round of executions in Grozny has elicited an immediate and negative response from the Russian government. On the same day that the executions took place the Russian Prosecutor General's Office said its stance against public executions remained unchanged and that a new criminal... MORE

According to reports in a Dagestani newspaper, Chechnya is not the only subject of the Russian Federation where criminals (or suspected criminals) are executed publicly. In May, a couple accused of murdering their child were executed in the square of the Dagestani city of Buinaksk.... MORE

Duma Defense Committee chairman and retired gen. Lev Rokhlin presided September 20 at the founding congress of a new movement called "Support the Army, Defense Industry, and Science." Rokhlin said President Boris Yeltsin is the main obstacle to the aims of the new movement --... MORE

Former Security Council secretary and retired gen. Aleksandr Lebed's earlier charge that as many 100 small nuclear weapons are missing (see Monitor, September 8) just will not go away. Lebed repeated the accusation on September 19 during a visit to Japan, insisting that the "problem... MORE

Less than a month after his allegations about missing nuclear weapons stirred up tensions between Moscow and the U.S., Aleksandr Lebed may last week have managed to ruffle Moscow's diplomatic relations with Tokyo as well. Lebed's suggestion, made during a visit to the Japanese capital,... MORE

Many Russians have been disturbed recently by the spate of exercises along their borders involving NATO troops. Currently there is a similar event on Russian soil that is likely to raise reciprocal concerns in some NATO capitals -- a joint exercise involving Russian and Syrian... MORE

The government of Belarus reacted bitterly over the weekend to two decisions just taken by the European Union. The EU Committee of Foreign Ministers, accusing official Minsk in effect of bad faith, resolved to end its sponsorship and mediation of the political dialogue between President... MORE

The Georgian parliament on September 19 unanimously approved the nomination of Jemal Gahokidze as minister of state security. Gahokidze told the parliament that he plans to decentralize the organization's management, create separate services for intelligence and counterintelligence, reduce manpower by 10 percent, transfer the crack... MORE

The second and final stage of the CentrasBat-97 military exercise was held from September 18-20 at the Chirchik training range outside Tashkent. Participants included the Uzbek-Kazakh-Kyrgyz joint battalion CentrasBat; a reinforced company of the U.S. Army's 82nd airborne division; and one platoon each from Turkey,... MORE