For the third consecutive day, members of the Chechen delegation have been unable to fly to The Hague, where they are supposed to be taking part in an international conference on Chechnya. On May 20, the Chechen delegation was stopped by Russian fighter jets on... MORE

Russian president Boris Yeltsin has refused to sign into law a bill on works of art seized by the Soviet army in Germany at the end of World War II and has returned it for the second time to the Federation Council. (Itar-Tass, May 22)... MORE

Angry at the slow pace of military reform, President Boris Yeltsin yesterday fired Defense Minister Igor Rodionov and the chief of the General Staff, Army Gen. Viktor Samsonov, at a stormy meeting of the Russian Defense Council. The commander in chief of the Strategic Rocket... MORE

Russia's Central Bank plans shortly to strip 200 private banks of their licenses. An additional 200 will lose their licenses by the end of 1997, according to Sergei Yegorov, president of the Association of Russian Banks. Russia currently has around 2,000 private banks. (Itar-Tass, May... MORE

Meeting in the Kremlin yesterday to finalize the Charter of the Russia-Belarus Union, which they signed earlier today, Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Lukashenko demonstratively played down the event's significance. "Do not expect anything sensational from this meeting," Yeltsin advised the press. "This is nothing... MORE

Japanese foreign minister Yukihiko Ikeda yesterday denied the conventional wisdom that Japan has been reticent to admit Russia into the G-7, and said that, in fact, Tokyo "positively evaluates Russia's active contribution at summits." Ikeda is expected to meet with President Boris Yeltsin, and will... MORE

An international conference -- entitled "The Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria: Restoration of Relations" -- opened this morning in The Hague. The conference, which is organized within the framework of the "Hague initiative," is being attended by the presidents of Tatarstan and... MORE

Gen. Igor Sergeev has been appointed Russian minister of defense and Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin has been named acting chief of the General Staff, President Boris Yeltsin's press secretary announced this morning. (Itar-Tass, May 23) The appointments follow Yeltsin's surprise dismissal of Russia's top military commanders... MORE

President Levon Ter-Petrosian's politically powerful elder brother, Telman Ter-Petrosian, is being buried in Yerevan today following a fatal heart attack at the age of 59. Born, like his brother, in Syria, Telman Ter-Petrosian was the director of Soviet Armenia's largest defense plant, Hrazdanmash. He was... MORE

At their joint news conference, Kwasniewski and Kuchma also announced that they would meet with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in Tallinn on May 27 for consultations on economic and security issues in the region between the Baltic and Black seas. Kwasniewski remarked... MORE