The Moscow Aircraft Production Association [MAPO], manufacturer of MiG fighters, has already lined up export orders worth $1.2 billion this year and expects to sell aircraft abroad worth $7.1 billion by the year 2000. MAPO includes both the MiG and the Kamov Helicopter design bureaus.... MORE

Maj. Gen. Gafar Mirzoyev announced today that his Presidential Guard has completed without losses an operation to "neutralize" part of the Sodirov brothers' detachment in the Garm area, some 85 kilometers east of Dushanbe. An Opposition force has sustained losses while fighting the main part... MORE

Speculation continues in the Russian media over President Boris Yeltsin's threat to reshuffle the cabinet. Most of today's newspapers dismiss the report carried by Izvestia yesterday, according to which Yeltsin has decided to replace Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin with Anatoly Chubais or Yegor Gaidar. (Izvestia,... MORE

The long smoldering conflict between Russia's defense minister, Igor Rodionov, and the secretary of the country's Defense Council, Yuri Baturin, burst back into the open yesterday as the Kremlin was compelled to order Rodionov to cease his public complaining and to get to work instead... MORE

Russian president Boris Yeltsin has signed the 1997 federal budget into law. (Itar-Tass, RTR, February 26) Skepticism remains about whether the income-side estimates are realistic. The government says the target revenues can be met if tax reform is carried out, but the fact that a... MORE

President Yeltsin has sacked his personal photographer, security guard Dmitry Sokolov, for drunkenness. The hapless Sokolov is reportedly one of a dozen officers, including one of those charged with carrying the nuclear briefcase, recently fired from the president's security service. The sackings are said to... MORE

Unnamed sources in the German government said on February 25 that Bonn will not deport hundreds of former Soviet soldiers who deserted in the former East Germany. The sources said that the federal authorities had decided to leave the question of how to deal with... MORE

The Russian Duma, host to a 243-member "Anti-NATO" group, intends to send deputies to various European capitals in order to lobby their parliaments against NATO enlargement. According to Duma deputy chairman Sergei Baburin, an ultra-nationalist and a member of the group's coordinating council, the lobbying... MORE

Claiming that domestic developments preclude his leaving Russia at this time, Russian first deputy prime minister Viktor Ilyushin yesterday informed Tokyo that he would be unable to visit Japan as planned on February 28. According to a Japanese Foreign Ministry official, Ilyushin gave assurances the... MORE

The U.S. space agency NASA is to send a team of experts to Russia next month to investigate delays into the development of the planned international space station. Russia announced on February 24 that it had fallen behind on building a navigational module for the... MORE