Keeping up a frenetic pace these days, the Prosecutor General’s Office arrested and jailed the head of Media-MOST’s finance department.

Presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov painted a bleak picture of what awaits Russia this year.

A former British intelligence agent on the run will publish his banned memoirs in Moscow next week.

A Council of Europe delegation is once again touring Chechnya to assess whether the military has made any progress combating widespread human rights abuses by its troops there.

Paris Club debt is one of the only debts that our otherwise generous government seems reluctant to pay.

The growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church has led some atheists to band together to defend the once-official ideology

Old Soviet passports no longer entitle CIS citizens to live in Russia; they now need residency permits.

Lord Judd, the leader of a fact-finding mission from the Council of Europe, criticized federal forces for mistreating civilians.

Emboldened by the Kremlin’s anthem fever, St. Petersburg is looking to put lyrics to its own anthem.

Russia's Supreme Court quashed the conviction for spying of thriller writer and diplomat Platon Obukhov.

Mayor Yury Luzhkov unleashed a verbal caning on two of his top officials for delivering a shoddy report on the state of Moscow’s monuments.

Fear is spreading through the enclave of Kaliningrad that the European Union’s eastern expansion will isolate Moscow’s western-most outpost, casting it deeper into poverty.

Moscow Flu StrikesMoscow has been gripped by this winter’s first outbreak of a flu epidemic, Interfax reported.Krasnodar Poisoning Health officials in a southern Russian town were quoted as saying they had tracked down the cause of a mass outbreak of food poisoning that made almost 500 people ill. Suspect ExtraditedA Russian man accused of killing a police officer was extradited to Moscow from Hungary after a five-year, Europe-wide Interpol search, officials said.Gongadze AppealThe mother of missing Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze made an emotional appeal to parliament Tuesday to help her find out once and for all if a decapitated corpse was that of her son. Kuril Talks ScheduledWhile Moscow reasserted its tough claim on the disputed Kuril Islands, visiting Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono announced Tuesday an upcoming summit between Russian and Japanese leaders to tackle the long-running territorial dispute. Robertson in ArmeniaNATO Secretary-General George Robertson said Tuesday that stability in the Caucasus region was important for the security of the alliance, and called for cooperation between NATO and ex-Soviet republics. Siberian Freeze A ship carrying 200 passengers became ice-bound off Russia’s Pacific coast, and Vladivostok residents blocked roads Tuesday to protest power cuts as a record freeze plunged much of the country into more chaos. Pope to Visit UkraineThe Vatican said Tuesday that Pope John Paul II would visit Ukraine June 23-27. Kazan ExplosionTwo people were killed by an explosion that ripped through an apartment in Kazan, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Tuesday.

It seems the Paris Club isn’t prepared to cut Russia any slack with its Soviet-era debt. Sergei Kolotukhin doesn’t think there is anything extraordinary about this.