The Istanbul summit marked the entry of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into NATO as full members. In one of the keynote addresses during the summit, Latvia's President Vaira Vike-Freiberga spoke for all the ten countries that joined NATO between 2002 and 2004. She looked back... MORE

En route to Istanbul for the NATO summit, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stopped in Moldova and conferred with President Vladimir Voronin. Rumsfeld's formal purpose was to thank Moldova for contributing 44 de-mining specialists to the coalition force in Iraq until March, and its... MORE

President Leonid Kuchma was finally able to meet President George W. Bush at the June NATO summit in Istanbul. Over the last three years the Bush administration had rebuffed attempts by Kuchma to return to the cozy U.S.-Ukrainian relationship of the 1990s under President Bill... MORE

A November 2003 document prepared by Russian "political technologists" working for Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the Presidential Administration, has been leaked to Ukrayinska Pravda (June 25). The report outlines how President Leonid Kuchma could win a third term by discrediting his main opponent as a... MORE

On the eve of the official July 3 launch of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, front-runner Viktor Yushchenko announced three important steps in his campaign strategy. The three-pronged approach will help Yushchenko consolidate a wide-embracing election campaign against his main opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych,... MORE

Tension has again re-surfaced surrounding the autumn 2000 murder and beheading of Ukrainian opposition journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. On June 17, Hryhoriy Omelchenko, head of the parliamentary committee investigating the murder, announced that his commission had reached a unanimous verdict. The commission concluded that Ukrainian President... MORE

On June 22, five days before the Lithuanian presidential election runoff, the government's Special Investigations Service (SIS) raided the offices of four political parties, seized financial and other documents, and announced "corruption" indictments against five politicians from those parties. The four parties are: Social-Democrats, led... MORE

A delegation of 27 Vienna-based ambassadors to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from member countries visited Moldova on June 9-12. This unprecedented, mass descent was followed by the visit of OSCE's Chairman-in-Office for 2004, Bulgarian Foreign Affairs Minister Solomon Passy, in... MORE

Lithuanian Social-Democrat Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas, and voters who look to him for leadership, hold the key to the outcome of the June 27 presidential election runoff in Lithuania. Brazauskas, one of the founding fathers of the restored Lithuanian state and a successful president and... MORE

In the best traditions of investigative journalism, the opposition Ukrayinska Pravda (June 3 and 11) newspaper has uncovered, for the first time, how Ukrainian oligarchs and their Russian advisers censor the Ukrainian media. Censorship operates through the use of secret instructions (temnyky) sent to television... MORE