Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov met with Boris Yeltsin yesterday and got the president's permission for Moscow to opt out of the nationwide reform of housing and utilities being coordinated by First Deputy Premier Boris Nemtsov. Luzhkov argued that the situation in Moscow is so different... MORE

Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov convened a meeting of his Presidential Council yesterday to get its approval of a draft peace settlement which he is expected to take soon to Moscow and present to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. First Deputy Premier Movladi Udugov said that some... MORE

Russia's Interagency Commission Against Terrorism, set up by the government in January to coordinate the anti-terrorism activities of federal agencies, met for the first time on May 6. It includes representatives of the Ministries of Defense and of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service (FSB),... MORE

Presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, and Petru Lucinschi of Moldova, together with OSCE chairman-in-office Niels Hdelvig Petersen and Transdniester leader Igor Smirnov, signed a memorandum today in the Kremlin on the principles of settling the Transdniester conflict. The core of the... MORE

Belarusan president Aleksandr Lukashenko warned on May 6 that he will "extirpate terrorism with a red-hot iron." Lukashenko elaborated on charges made the previous day by his chief spokesman that "terrorists" of the political opposition had recently blown up several gas distribution pipelines, but conceded... MORE

NATO secretary general Javier Solana paid a one-day visit to Kiev yesterday for the opening of NATO's Information Center in the Ukrainian capital. In what was described as a secondary goal of his visit, Solana discussed with President Leonid Kuchma and other Ukrainian officials the... MORE

President Levon Ter-Petrosian has decreed the creation of a high-level State Council for Relations with the Diaspora, to be headed by Prime Minister Robert Kocharian. He was until recently president of the unrecognized Karabakh Republic. The council will inter alia coordinate relations between the Armenian... MORE

President Islam Karimov conferred yesterday in Tashkent with South Korea's Daewoo corporation president Kim-U-Jong on the company's massive involvement in Uzbekistan. The corporation recently commissioned the first stage of the Uz-Daewoo joint venture, Central Asia's largest automobile-manufacturing firm, located in Asaka, Andijon region (Ferghana Valley).... MORE

Two Russian journalists, a man and a woman, were freed by Chechen police in Djohar-gala yesterday. The two journalists, from the Urals town of Satka, went to Chechnya to look for a Russian soldier from Satka who had disappeared. They were abducted March 15 just... MORE

The Moscow police is setting up a special unit to combat prostitution. Prostitution is nothing new in Russia, but it has become much more blatant since the Soviet period. Russia's minister for internal affairs, Anatoly Kulikov, was reportedly so staggered by the number of prostitutes... MORE