June 28:
Russia and the Atlantic Alliance have mended fences. The New York Times reports that NATO and Russia have held a high-level meeting of foreign ministers on the Greek island of Corfu. The summit saw all parties pledge a resumption of full military cooperation, effectively ending the rift that emerged between the Kremlin and the Alliance following Russia's incursion into Georgia last fall. “I could qualify the spirit of the meeting as open and constructive, which means that no one tried to paper over our differences in the meeting, on Georgia, for example,” NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters following the summit. “But we agreed... not to let those disagreements bring the whole NATO-Russia Council train to a halt.”
July 4:
Nine Chechen policemen have been killed killed in Ingushetia. Lenta.ru reports that the men, operatives of the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs, died in an assault on their police convoy in neighboring Ingushetia. Ten others were injured in the attack when unknown assailants opened fire from a nearby forest using grenade launchers and heavy assault rifles.
July 6:
At their first summit, Presidents Obama and Medvedev have agreed to negotiate a new bilateral arms control deal to replace the START treaty, the Associated Press reports. Meeting in Moscow, the two leaders signed a "joint understanding" committing their countries to reducing their respective arsenals significantly, to between 1,500 and 1,650 warheads from current levels of of 1,700 or more. The new deal, to be negotiated in coming months, will also impose new limits on bombers and both land-based and submarine-launched missiles.
Kyiv has put the Kremlin on notice that it must tone down its bellicose rhetoric toward the former Soviet satellite, or face the consequences. The warning, relayed through the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow, counseled Russian diplomats to refrain from insults towards Ukraine if they wish to remain "wanted guests on the Ukrainian soil." According to Lenta.ru, the demarche came after a verbal brawl between Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Yuschenko, during his recent visit to Sevastopol, noted that cultural projects currently being carried out by the Russian government in Ukraine, but which violate the laws of the latter, "should not exist." Luzhkov responded by calling Yuschenko's remarks "utter idiocy."
July 7:
A new report from a leading international economic think tank has listed Russia as one of the world's most closed economies. The study, carried out by the World Economic Forum, which hosts the annual summit in Davos, Switzerland, places Russia in 114th place out of 121 countries surveyed. The ranking puts Russia behind Ethiopia, Mauritania and Pakistan among countries it is easy to trade with, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Russia's ruling "United Russia" party is seeking the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the party has announced that it will henceforth present all Duma projects to the Patriarch Kirill for approval. By doing so, party leaders have said, they hope to avoid "misunderstandings." Such a move, the paper notes, is a controversial one. While it will undoubtedly attract more voters and makes the party look more legitimate, it will also deeply involve the office of the Patriarch in the secular affairs of the Russian state.
[Editor's Note: Such a political role for the Patriarch is not without precedent. Kirill's predecessor, the Patriarch Aleksii, was accused by a number of political activists of being a KGB agent following the release of records from the archives of the Estonian KGB following the collapse of the USSR.]