Late on November 3 (November 4 in Europe) the General Motors (GM) corporation decided to retain ownership of its heavily indebted German subsidiary Opel. The decision reverses GM’s September 10 tentative consent to sell a majority stake in Opel to a Kremlin-dominated consortium.GM’s reversal became... MORE

On October 29, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s son Maksim Bakiyev was promoted to lead the Central Agency on Development, Investment, and Innovation (www.akipress.kg, October 29). The agency was formed as a result of Bakiyev’s recent government reform and is entitled to control all foreign financial... MORE

Local government elections held on October 11 in 75 regions of Russia were massively rigged by the authorities in favor of the ruling United Russia party. There is, of course, nothing particularly new about election fraud in Russia –the nation is not a democracy and... MORE

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on November 2 called Ukraine “a big problem” when asked about the situation in Central and Eastern Europe as the region worst hit by the global crisis. Recent steps in the economy aimed to “buy” voters ahead... MORE

On October 30, Ingushetia’s President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov announced the imminent launch of a program for voluntarily resettling unemployed people in his republic in Sverdlovsk oblast, which lies on the Eastern slopes of the Middle and North Urals and the Western Siberian Plain. In an interview... MORE

Russia currently holds a greater degree of relevance and influence in Moldovan politics than at any time during the eight years of nominal communist rule (2001-2009) and indeed since 1991 in that country. Russia’s growing political role is a direct result of Moldova’s indecisive parliamentary... MORE

From October 30 to November 1 the Moldovan parliamentary majority’s candidate for head of state, Western-oriented Marian Lupu, as well as the communist opposition leader, and former head of state (2001-2009) Vladimir Voronin, undertook parallel visits to Moscow upon invitations there. Such a turn of... MORE

The ongoing campaign against triads, or Chinese-style mafias, in the west-China metropolis of Chongqing is the largest such operation since 1949. Yet what renders this so-called “anti-triad tornado” (fanhei fengbao) so disturbing is not simply that close to 3,000 big-time criminals have been nabbed by... MORE

Even as the Chinese economy under the Hu-Wen administration is set to wean through the global financial crisis with a remarkable eight percent growth rate this year, senior officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs under the jurisdiction of the State Council, which is responsible... MORE

Viktor Yanukovych was put forward as a presidential candidate at the congress of the Party of Regions on October 23 (www.partyofregions.org.ua, October 23). Yanukovych’s foreign policy can be gauged from several policies that he and his party have previously supported and the content of his... MORE