The Russian military is claiming further successes in eliminating key Chechen rebel leaders. A spokesman in the operational headquarters of the federal forces in Chechnya, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, claimed yesterday that three field commanders loyal to Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov were killed on May... MORE

The leader of Crimea's communists, Leonid Hrach, has lost both his parliamentary speakership and his seat in the Crimean legislature. When, on April 19, Ukraine's Supreme Court overruled Hrach's disqualification from the Crimean election for a faulty property declaration, it seemed as if Hrach would... MORE

The March 31 Verkhovna Rada (parliament) elections have been followed by a major reshuffle in Ukraine's governing elite. Those who left President Leonid Kuchma's camp obviously had to go; several local officials were punished for the poor performance of pro-government forces in the election; those... MORE

Since April 26, Russia and Georgia have resumed the long-running, on-and-off negotiations toward signing a "framework" political treaty on bilateral relations. This document is supposed to supersede the treaty Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze signed in 1994 that never took effect. Although Georgia's parliament... MORE

On March 30, a first group of some twenty U.S. Army Green Berets arrived in Georgia, launching a mission originally announced in late February and early March. The deployment, scheduled to include some 200 U.S. special troops, is America's first in the South Caucasus, and... MORE

Another week of intensive negotiations appears to have brought Russia and the United States ever closer to an agreement on reducing their strategic nuclear arsenals, but officials yesterday remained unwilling to say with certainty that the accord will be ready for signing when Presidents George... MORE

Yesterday's traditional May Day rallies in Moscow passed off peacefully. There were two separate rallies in the Russian capital, one led by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) the other by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) in conjunction with United Russia,... MORE

As part of their efforts to meet NATO's admission criteria, the Baltic states are on the verge of making strategic decisions with regard to military specialization. This concept calls for countries to concentrate on achieving top proficiency in certain types of military activity, and to... MORE

Germany hesitated a long time before officially endorsing the Baltic states' candidacy for NATO membership. It was not until last October that the Social-Democrat-led government finally budged on this issue; and even then, the Chancellor's Office seemed content to yield the policy initiative to the... MORE

Ambitious plans by Russia and India to jointly design, develop and manufacture high-tech weapons systems bore some early fruit over the weekend when India announced that it had conducted a successful test of its "BrahMos" supersonic cruise missile. The name BrahMos is based on the... MORE