President Yeltsin has appointed Valentin Yumashev as his new chief of staff. (Itar-Tass, March 11) Yumashev, 39, has no former political experience and has spent all his career to date as a print journalist. He joined Ogonek in 1987, when the magazine was a flagship... MORE

Relations between Israel and Russia received a boost yesterday, as President Boris Yeltsin called for the two countries to put past tensions behind them and visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that bilateral ties should be raised to the level of a "new partnership"... MORE

Although the 23 trillion rubles in tax receipts received by the Russian government during January and February 1997 were well above the corresponding monthly collection figures for late 1996, recently released data show that fiscal arrears during 1996 increased by a factor of 2.26, to... MORE

President Yeltsin has issued a decree ordering the authorities in Udmurtia (which, unlike most of Russia's republics, does not have an elected president but is governed by a State Council) to obey a January ruling of the Russian Constitutional Court. According to that ruling, the... MORE

Held yesterday in Minsk against a background of mass protests (see Monitor, March 11), a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Russia-Belarus Community achieved little more than electing Russian Duma chairman Gennady Seleznev as head of the Assembly. Despite considerable rhetoric, no decisions were... MORE

An officer from the Russian navy has been named to head Georgia's embryonic Navy, the second person to hold the post since Rear Adm. Aleksandr Javakhishvili was fired last December. Capt. Otar Chkhartishvili, 47, had been serving as a deputy chief of staff of the... MORE

The March 7 bomb attack against a Beijing public bus was carried out by Uighur militants from Xinjiang, according to a statement by the Turkey-based Organization for the Independence of East Turkestan. The militants threatened more of the same in retaliation for "Communist Chinese oppression"... MORE

The Supreme Court of Azerbaijan has sentenced Aga Ahundov, head of the dissolved Gardashlyg ("Fraternity") organization, to eight years in prison on charges of attempting to overthrow the government by force and creating of an unlawful armed group. Ahundov, jailed since 1995, was implicated in... MORE

Armenia is unlikely to receive the next $25 million tranche of its $150 million Extended Structural Adjustment Facility before mid-June. (Noyan Tapan, March 3, 7) This conclusion emerged at the end of a week-long IMF mission to Yerevan, during which time Fund Representative Thanos Catsambas... MORE

President Boris Yeltsin began his promised cabinet shake-up today by ordering almost the entire government to resign. The sole exceptions are Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and First Deputy Premier Anatoly Chubais, who was appointed to his new post late last week. Yeltsin has given Chernomyrdin... MORE