Two minutes before midnight on December 31, Russia's Gazprom and the Belarusian government signed a contract to supply Russian gas to Belarus for the next five years. Had the agreement not been signed, Gazprom had threatened to cut off gas supplies to its smaller neighbor,... MORE

Indications are multiplying that the Ukrainian government is abandoning a project to extend the Odessa-Brody pipeline into Poland as a route for Kazakhstani oil outside Russian control. Instead, the Ukrainian government now intends to connect the Odessa-Brody pipeline with the Druzhba pipeline that carries Russian... MORE

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has replaced the leadership of his party, People’s Union-Our Ukraine (NSNU). The NSNU’s business wing, the “dear friends” who controlled the party since its foundation in spring 2005, have been banished from the leadership. Yushchenko apparently holds them responsible for the... MORE

Information released following the December 10-11 session of the Ukraine-Kazakhstan Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation suggests that Russia has successfully forced an indefinite postponement of the Odessa-Brody-Plock oil transport project. Kazakh and U.S. companies in that country were to have been the oil suppliers and... MORE

Even in its failure, the OSCE year-end conference on December 4-5 in Brussels managed to highlight the fact that Russia’s conflict undertakings in Georgia and Moldova constitute the main problem of European security at present. This fact had been implicitly understood for some time, but... MORE

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has lost at least two of the four ministers who remained loyal to him while working in Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's cabinet. Parliament, which is dominated by the Anti-Crisis Coalition (AKK) -- consisting of Yanukovych's Party of Regions (PRU), the Communists,... MORE

Belarus, the Soviet republic most heavily affected by fallout from the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, has decided to develop its own nuclear power industry. On December 1, Mikhail Myasnikovich, chairman of the National Academy of Sciences, made the announcement at a meeting concerning the... MORE

The constitutional reform that Ukraine’s parliament passed during the Orange Revolution in December 2004 and that came into effect after the March 2006 parliamentary election may now be revised. President Viktor Yushchenko and the parties that are in opposition to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych believe... MORE

Over the past few days Belarusian officials have held several high-level meetings involving Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan, and Minsk played host to a summit of Commonwealth of Independent States leaders. President Alexander Lukashenka has used the period constructively, in an apparent quest to stave off... MORE

The team of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych has mounted an offensive against Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, one of a handful of ministers loyal to President Viktor Yushchenko. Lutsenko spearheaded the anti-corruption campaign that was launched after Yushchenko came to power in 2005. Several Donetsk-based... MORE