NATO secretary general Javier Solana is to travel to the U.S. for a meeting with President Bill Clinton on May 19, the White House said yesterday. Solana, who successfully negotiated the May 14 NATO-Russia agreement (see below), will presumably brief Clinton on the Moscow talks.... MORE

From May 15 Russia will levy a 25 percent tariff on sugar imports from the CIS. (Interfax, May 15) The tariff, which does not apply to members of the Customs Union, will mainly affect Ukraine, which sold 1.3 million tons of sugar to Russia in... MORE

The Kremlin proposes to include in the Russia-Belarus union treaty or charter a commitment to political unification of the two countries in a federal state. However, Belarusan president Aleksandr Lukashenko and his delegates to the joint drafting commission "categorically oppose" this proposal, Russian president Boris... MORE

Today is the deadline for the parties to the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty to ratify the May 1996 review conference final document which modified the treaty rules regarding the so-called "flanks" zone. This dealt with the amount of military equipment Russia could... MORE

Estonian president Lennart Meri told a news conference in Budapest yesterday that the big power to the east that opposes NATO's enlargement remains an "evil empire." Without naming Russia directly, Meri observed that the empire, "now a shadow of its former self, never willingly relinquished... MORE

Russian interior minister Anatoly Kulikov flew to Vladivostok yesterday as street protests continued over power cuts of up to 20 hours a day that have been plaguing the city. Police clashed yesterday with protesters who had blocked main roads in the city for the third... MORE

A vignette in a popular Russian newspaper describes what is says is a typical day for a member of Russia's new business elite. A man with an unidentified business from an unidentified region, he is shown flying to Moscow for a whirl of business meetings... MORE

One person was killed, three were wounded, and eighteen people were taken hostage on the evening of May 12 during an armed confrontation between representatives of two religious sects in the village of Chabana-Makhi in Dagestan's Buinaksk District. Following the intervention of the Dagestani authorities,... MORE

The new federal commission on the Chechen Republic met for the first time in Moscow yesterday, and, chaired by Russian Security Council secretary Ivan Rybkin, set to work on a detailed plan for executing the agreements signed between Russia and Chechnya on May 12. The... MORE

Nearly four months of direct negotiations came to an apparently successful close on May 14, as Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov and NATO secretary general Javier Solana announced that they had reached agreement on a document -- called the NATO-Russia Founding Act -- spelling out... MORE