Baltic Challenge-97, a military exercise in the framework of NATO's Partnership for Peace program, opened yesterday in the Estonian town of Paldiski, the former Soviet naval base. Some 2,700 troops, including 1,400 from the U.S., small groups from four Nordic countries and Ukraine (just 20... MORE

On July 9 the Ukrainian cabinet reprimanded Coal Minister Yury Rusantsov following an investigation of the allocation of budget funds in 1996 and early 1997. Serious errors were also found in the work of several other ministries, including that for social security. The cabinet needs... MORE

The commanders of border troops of Russia and Belarus, Generals Andrei Nikolaev and Alyaksandr Pavlovski, signed yesterday in Minsk an agreement creating a Joint Committee for Border Protection, to be headed by the Russian side. The Committee's tasks include organizing border control on the borders... MORE

A Slavic University opened in Chisinau yesterday, founded by Moldova's branch of the Slavic Language and Culture Foundation and by Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Polish ethnic community associations. Instruction will be offered in all those languages and also in Moldovan (Romanian). The university is a... MORE

Georgian officials have repeated their charges that Russia illegally removed Soviet military equipment from Georgia following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, and they continue to insist that Tbilisi is entitled either to receive some of this equipment back or to be compensated... MORE

A small home-made bomb was found outside the front entrance to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office in Moscow in the early hours yesterday morning. The device exploded while it was being examined by bomb disposal experts; windows were broken in the blast but no-one was... MORE

Russia's Foreign Ministry on July 11 issued a statement strongly condemning a NATO operation, launched in Bosnia one day earlier, that left one accused Serb war criminal dead and that brought another to the Hague to face trial. The statement said that "such cowboy raids... MORE

During talks in St. Petersburg on July 12, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov reportedly agreed to recommend jointly that the current round of Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) talks be extended until the end of this month --... MORE

Russian and Chechen government officials meeting in Moscow on July 11 signed long-awaited customs and banking agreements, removing all remaining obstacles to the signing of a general political agreement between Moscow and Djohar-gala. The agreements also cleared the way for the signing, in Baku on... MORE

The incumbent mayor of Nizhny Novgorod, Ivan Sklyarov, won yesterday's run-off election for governor of the region, garnering 52 percent of the vote to beat his rival, Gennady Khodyrev. Also yesterday, a run-off election for mayor of Samara was won by Georgy Limansky -- the... MORE