SUMMIT AGAIN POSTPONED.

CIS executive secretary Ivan Korotchenya has announced a further postponement of the CIS summit originally due to have been held in September. Following postponements from month to month, its latest scheduled date on December 8, 1995 has been tentatively shifted to January 12, 1996. Korotchenya cited prescheduled foreign trips by the presidents in the first part of December, and their desire to be at home for the holidays, as the reasons for shifting the summit into January. But Korotchenya, backed up the same day by Boris Yeltsin’s international affairs adviser Dmitry Ryurikov, insisted that this summit will be "very important as it will outline prospects for reintegration" of the CIS countries. (21)

Korotchenya and Ryurikov failed to mention that Yeltsin’s illness must be a consideration in the latest rescheduling of the summit. But beyond this accidental factor, the summit’s repeated postponement mainly stems from some of the countries’ opposition to Moscow’s efforts to strengthen supranational mechanisms at the expense of national sovereignty. Moreover, as Korotchenya implicitly admitted, some of the presidents attach a higher priority to foreign trips than to a CIS summit when a scheduling conflict occurs.

Russia’s Duma Warns Kazakhstan.