Russian Chief of General Staff Yuri Baluyevsky was dispatched to Beijing March 17-20 in order to finalize plans for unprecedented joint war games this fall. However, the upcoming drill wields a double-edged sword. Official pronouncements have sounded decidedly optimistic. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and... MORE

The Russian media paid about as much attention to President Vladimir Putin's weekend visit to Paris than it did to his meeting with the victorious team from the Paris-Dakar road rally (Ezhednevny zhurnal, March 17). Little is known about his talks with French President Jacques... MORE

Yet another quarrel between Gazprom and Rosneft, Russian state-owned energy companies that are due to merge but cannot agree on conditions, hardly qualifies as news (Financial Times, March 16). Their respective CEOs -- Alexei Miller and Sergei Bogdanchikov -- have been at odds since the... MORE

Sergei Bagapsh, Eduard Kokoiti, and Arkady Gukasian, leaders respectively of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Karabakh, spent most of this week meeting with Russian officials in Moscow. They also held a publicly reported meeting there among themselves on March 16. Transnistria leader Igor Smirnov was expected... MORE

Moscow's political and business elites spent much of yesterday (March 17) discussing who was behind an apparent attempt that morning to kill Anatoly Chubais, head of Unified Energy Systems (UES), Russia's electricity monopoly, and the architect of Russia's controversial post-Soviet privatization program. The three main... MORE

With the release of a strategy dubbed its "Eastern Program," the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom revealed its plans to boost gas exports to East Asian markets in the coming years. Alexei Mastepanov, an advisor to Gazprom chairman Alexei Miller, announced the strategy at the... MORE

On March 4 the Russian government announced the closure of the Federal Fund for the Support of Small Business, an agency created ten years ago with a budget of 25 billion rubles ($1 billion) to invest in small business promotion. The FFPMP set up a... MORE

Observing the bitter disputes around Russian military bases in Georgia, sour demarches in the State Duma against Moldova, and icy diplomatic exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, it is hard to believe that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still a functioning organization. As Russian... MORE

Russo-Japanese relations appear to have digressed back to the zero-sum, tit-for-tat, tenor that defined the relationship throughout the Cold War. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced on Thursday, March 10, that he would not attend the VE- Day celebrations to be held in Moscow this... MORE

Russia's nuclear policy has once again become the stuff of controversy. On the one hand, domestic right-wingers, darkly suspicious of rumored U.S.-Russian agreements to put Russia's nuclear arsenal under some form of American supervision or control, are attacking the regime for selling out Russian sovereignty... MORE