Hungary's foreign minister yesterday praised NATO enlargement as a policy that "could prevent any efforts which might reappear for hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe." Laszlo Kovacs also said that Russia currently poses no military threat to the region. But his thinly-veiled reference to a... MORE

Russian president Boris Yeltsin this morning delivered his first policy statement since being re-elected last July. In a long-postponed state of the nation address to the Russian parliament, Yeltsin promised sweeping changes to Russia's system of government and economic management. At 25 minutes, the address... MORE

The Russian Duma has voted 245 to 1 to hold a closed preliminary hearing on the START II strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty on March 19. Aleksei Mitrofanov, chairman of the Duma's Geopolitical Committee, made the proposal. According to Aleksei Arbatov, a deputy belonging to... MORE

A Goskomstat (State Statistical Office) report released in late February suggests that the declines in Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) and industrial output may be coming to an end. Goskomstat figures indicate that industrial production during January was slightly (0.3 percent) above January 1996 levels,... MORE

Academician Stanislav Shatalin has died at the age of 62. (Interfax, March 3) Shatalin, a leading Soviet economist of the mathematical school, is best known as leader of the team that produced in August-September 1990 what became known as the "500 Days Program" for radical... MORE

Some 5,000, mainly young people carrying banned national symbols demonstrated in the Belarusan capital on March 2 to mark the 930th anniversary of the city of Minsk and its first Christian church building. The Popular Front staged the event to raise public awareness of Belarus'... MORE

Moldovan president Petru Lucinschi's senior aide, Anatol Taran, has unveiled in Chisinau a plan to convene a Transdniester peace conference as soon as possible near Moscow. The event would take as its model the Dayton conference that produced a peace settlement for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Taran stressed... MORE

The commander of the Russian air force wants them, while his Ukrainian counterpart and the Ukrainian defense minister have no use for them and want to sell them, but the two countries seem no closer today to working out a deal on the transfer of... MORE

The inter-Tajik negotiations on military issues, underway since February 26 in Moscow amid serious but bridgeable differences, were suspended yesterday after the Opposition could no longer keep silent over two blows it received from Dushanbe. On February 25 the government ceased its operation against the... MORE

At a regular meeting in Almaty devoted to ecological problems on February 28, the presidents of the five Central Asian countries also considered the regional security implications of the Talibans' advance into northern Afghanistan. The discussion followed up a February 25 meeting held in Tashkent... MORE