In separate meetings with Yeltsin and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Kyrgyz president Askar Akaev secured "assistance pledges," including supplies of Russian generators for the Naryn River chain of hydropower stations -- an uncompleted Soviet-era project that represents one of Kyrgyzstan's few assets with strong export... MORE

Uzbek president Islam Karimov bluntly asserted his country's independence at the summit. Uzbekistan will "never agree to building supra-state structures upon economic ties;" "the countries will never return to any sort of Union...we oppose any association reminiscent of the former Union;" "the Commonwealth is just... MORE

In his address to the summit, made public in advance, Turkmen president Saparmurat Niazov ranked bilateral ahead of multilateral ties among CIS countries and came out against the creation of "supranational" or "controlling" bodies in the CIS. Like his Uzbek and Kazakstani counterparts, Niazov warned... MORE

During a summit-eve press interview in Almaty and again in Moscow, Kazakstani president Nursultan Nazarbaev defended subregional cooperation outside the CIS among Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan as more effective and more closely attuned to local needs than CIS cooperation. Denying that the tripartite Central Asian... MORE

Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze -- asked upon his arrival in Moscow on the eve of the summit what would happen if the CIS should cease to exist -- responded: "Nothing. We've adopted a lot of documents, but where's the beef? The member countries prefer bilateral... MORE

Ukraine, which rejected most "integrationist" proposals at the summit (see Monitor, March 31), valued the event mainly as the occasion for a bilateral meeting between Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Boris Yeltsin. The Russian president surprised and delighted Kuchma by promising to decouple the deadlocked issue... MORE

Russia registered a welcome decline in several infectious diseases in 1996, including measles and diphtheria, but tuberculosis, unfortunately, was not one of them. TB kills over 20,000 people a year in Russia and, because of the country's continuing social upheaval, the disease is spreading fast.... MORE

At a news conference that followed the March 28 CIS summit, Belarusan president Aleksandr Lukashenko distanced himself from those "post-Soviet countries that conduct a negative policy toward Russia. The Russian leadership and mass media are criticizing, attacking those countries; that is natural. We promote a... MORE

On April 1, Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and Dagestan's Security Council secretary Magomet Tolboev will meet with a number of Chechen field commanders to discuss the possibility of releasing the four Russian and the one Italian journalists who are being held captive in Chechnya. According... MORE

Russian officials continue to hint that Russia might not end its arms sales to Iran in 1999 as President Boris Yeltsin assured President Bill Clinton at their 1993 Washington summit. Many in Moscow have long chaffed at the American effort to isolate the present Iranian... MORE