Voters will go to the polls in Nizhny Novgorod oblast next Sunday, June 29, to choose a successor for former governor Boris Nemtsov, who joined the Russian government three months ago. The race is too close to call: Communist challenger Gennady Khodyrev is running only... MORE

With Ukraine's oft-postponed treaty of friendship, cooperation, and partnership with the Russian Federation finally signed on May 31, President Leonid Kuchma seems at last to feel in a strong enough position to tackle Kyiv's ongoing power struggle with Crimea. The peninsula is Ukraine's only autonomous... MORE

Suggestions that Russia would receive an economic payoff at this year's Group of Seven (G-7) summit in return for acquiescence to NATO's enlargement proved groundless. The Russian side came away with words of praise from its fellow-summiteers, but little in the way of concrete concessions.... MORE

Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin has accepted the temporary resignation of Justice Minister Valentin Kovalev. The action follows the June 20 publication by the Russian magazine Sovershenno secretno (Top Secret) of fuzzy photographs allegedly showing the 53-year-old minister frolicking with nude women in a Moscow... MORE

The Russian armed forces will receive 94 trillion rubles in 1998, Economics Minister Yakov Urinson announced on June 20. He compared this figure with the military budget of 64 trillion in 1996 and 83 trillion this year. The armed forces are hardly likely to find... MORE

Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze and Chevron overseas president Richard Matzke conferred yesterday in Tbilisi on the transportation of oil from Kazakstan's giant Tengiz field, a Chevron joint venture. Chevron is fully satisfied with the experimental transportation of Tengiz oil by rail via Azerbaijan and Georgia... MORE

In Baku yesterday the Japan National Oil Company, Itohu, and two other Japanese companies signed an agreement with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan on the principles of prospecting and development of three major oilfields, covering 500 square kilometers in the south of Azerbaijan's Caspian... MORE

Interviewed in the June 18 Izvestia, Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze said that Russia's troop contingent "protects the [Abkhaz] separatist regime by maintaining the division of Georgia along the Inguri river... The existing peacekeeping mechanism consolidates the outcome of ethnic purges and of the unlawful seizure... MORE

President Leonid Kuchma yesterday issued a decree appointing First Deputy Prime Minister Vasyl Durdinets as acting prime minister "for the duration of prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko's illness." Lazarenko is, however, not known to be ailing, and he had met on the preceding day with protesting... MORE

European Union-mediated talks between President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's administration and leaders of the forcibly dissolved parliament adjourned yesterday, after two days of procedural discussions. The sides agreed on the delegations' compositions after the opposition agreed to include in the parliamentary delegation a staunch Lukashenka loyalist, who... MORE