Earl Pitts, a veteran FBI agent arrested in December on charges of spying for Moscow, has been sentenced to 27 years in prison. The sentence was an even harsher one than had been sought by federal prosecutors, and was attributed to the enormity of Pitts's... MORE

The Russian Duma broke yesterday for its summer recess. It will resume work on September 1. First Deputy Premier Anatoly Chubais mocked the Duma's failure to approve the government's revised budget or its social welfare cuts, and stressed that the government will press ahead regardless.... MORE

Turkmenistan has reported a whopping 32.7 percent decline in industrial production during the first five months of 1997 (relative to the same period in 1996). According to a report recently issued by the State Statistical Committee, natural gas production declined by 38.8 percent during this... MORE

Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrosian and Prime Minister Robert Kocharian have received the chief of the General Staff of Greece, Gen. Atanasios Tsoganis, who paid a four-day visit to Armenia. Defense Minister Vazgen Sarkisian signed with Tsoganis an agreement on exchanges of military intelligence and on... MORE

At a congress in Minsk over the weekend, the Belarusan Popular Front reelected the emigre Zyanon Pazdnyak as its chairman and Lyavon Barshchevsky as acting chairman. Pazdnyak last year received political asylum in the U.S. and has since been politically active in Poland. In a... MORE

Interviewed in the Polish daily Rzecz Pospolita while on an official visit to Poland, Lithuanian president Algirdas Brazauskas stated that "the time of politicians of my age is drawing to a close" and asked rhetorically "whether politicians of my generation ought to get in the... MORE

Ukrainian state minister for energy and industry Anatoly Minchenko and Turkish energy minister Recai Kutan have signed in Ankara a $650 million agreement to lay a pipeline that would carry Middle Eastern oil across Anatolia to the Black Sea, for further shipment to Ukraine and... MORE

Russian companies apparently failed to make any major new sales at the recent Paris Air Show. However, the state-owned arms export company Rosvooruzhenie did announce yesterday from New Delhi that India had decided to buy 2 Russian-built Kilo-class diesel submarines. The subs were described as... MORE

Among the results of this past weekend's G-7 summit in Denver was an agreement between the U.S. and Russia which could clear the way to the imposition of new UN sanctions on Iraq. According to a senior U.S. official, the deal was struck when U.S.... MORE

On June 20, what purported to be a draft decree of the President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria [CRI] "On the De-Occupation of and Extension of CRI Jurisdiction to the Territory Between the Terek and Sulak Rivers," appeared in the newspaper Molodezh Dagestana. Dagestan's... MORE