Newly appointed Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh has admitted that Ukraine may experience serious problems meeting this year's target of 5 billion hryvnyas (US$920 million) in privatization revenues (Reuters, June 18). The State Property Agency had collected only 1.25 billion hryvnyas in privatization revenues in the... MORE

The June 23-27 visit of Pope John Paul II to predominantly Orthodox Christian Ukraine was marred by controversy. On the one hand, there were no much-feared mass protests of Orthodox believers of the Moscow Patriarchate against Roman Catholicism; on the other, the visit failed as... MORE

The case of John Tobin, the twenty-four-year-old American Fulbright scholar jailed earlier this year on a contentious drug possession charge in Russia, took yet another strange turn when authorities of the Federal Security Service (FSB) hinted this week that he is now once again under... MORE

Following the news that Russian special forces had managed to kill the Chechen rebel field commander Arbi Baraev, reports appeared in the Russian press that another top rebel warlord, the Jordanian-born Khattab, had also been killed during fighting along Chechnya's border with Georgia (see the... MORE

The Russian government appears set to breach the July 1 deadline for closing the Gudauta military base, situated in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia. The 1999 summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) set that binding deadline, which the Russian government... MORE

On June 26, Russia's border forces command announced that the Valentin Pikul, a Project 10410 vessel (NATO classification Firefly), will be deployed next month with the Russian coastal guard in the Caspian Sea. This recently launched patrol and combat vessel is stronger than any in... MORE

Suggestions that Russia and the United States may have narrowed their differences regarding UN policy toward Iraq, and that the two countries might be prepared to pool their energies in an effort to end the UN Security Council's long impasse over Iraq, have been proven... MORE

Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, who is also a deputy prime minister, claimed yesterday that the government has over the last three years reduced the total number of state bureaucrats. Kudrin, however, was contradicted by a member of the State Duma, who provided figures of his... MORE

This dispute between Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Kudrin and State Duma Deputy Yegor Ligachev over the size and cost of the state bureaucracy came on the heels of fresh revelations about bureaucratic corruption, this time in the Railways Ministry (MPS). The Audit Chamber, the state... MORE

Transparency International (TI), the Berlin-based corruption watchdog organization, yesterday released its Corruption Perceptions Index 2001, ranking countries according to their level of corruption as perceived by businessmen and others working and living in them. Out of the ninety-one countries ranked, Russia came in 79th, tied... MORE