According to Turkmen president Saparmurad Niazov's Ashgabat office, the president may return home within a week from the Munich cardiological clinic where he is now convalescing. Niazov will need a "lull" in his work for the next two or three months, the office said. (Itar-Tass,... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin brushed aside reports of an alleged plot to assassinate First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais with a comment that Belarusan president Alyaksandr Lukashenka also claims people are trying to assassinate him. (Russian TV, September 15) The Russian media also reacted skeptically: newspapers... MORE

The Kremlin scrambled yesterday to deny a newspaper report that Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov has submitted his resignation and will soon be leaving his post. The report, which appeared in Moskovskie novosti under the byline of Sergei Agafonov, suggested that the 67-year-old Primakov intended to... MORE

Prime ministers Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz and Gediminas Vagnorius, along with ministers of the two governments, established a Polish-Lithuanian Intergovernmental Cooperation Council at a meeting in Vilnius on September 14 and 15. The Council will hold plenary meetings at least twice annually and will work through four... MORE

A series of high-level statements in Moscow have reflected consternation over Belarusan president Alyaksandr Lukashenka's insistence on prosecuting Russian ORT TV journalists Pavel Sheremet and Dmitry Zavadsky. Russian president Boris Yeltsin's foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, along with First Deputy Foreign Minister Boris Pastukhov and... MORE

Four Georgian policemen were killed and five were wounded by gunmen during the night of September 14-15 in Svanetia, a high-altitude Georgian area adjacent to Abkhazia. Two of the gunmen were also killed. The police death toll rose from one to four after the Russian... MORE

The CentrasBat-97 military exercise began on September 15 in Kazakhstan, with the participation of a battalion of the U.S. Army's 82nd airborne division and the Kazakh-Kyrgyz-Uzbek joint battalion, CentrasBat. The exercise opened with the longest-distance airborne operation in military history. Six U.S. C-17 transport planes... MORE

United Tajik Opposition chairman Saidabdullo Nuri arrived on September 12 in Dushanbe together with opposition members of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), other opposition leaders, and some 30 bodyguards. The delegation's arrival, and the beginning of the Commission's work, had been postponed many times as... MORE

Russian president Boris Yeltsin yesterday issued a strong endorsement of the unratified START-2 nuclear arms reduction treaty. He told Defense Minister Igor Sergeev that it is necessary "to prove to the lawmakers that [ratification] is beneficial to us." Today, Sergeev and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov... MORE

Janice Ballantine, the Moscow director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told a conference in Novgorod on September 12 that the U.S. will phase out all its aid programs to Russia by the year 2001. USAID spent $1.5 billion in Russia between 1992 and... MORE