#2
ORT Review
www.ortv.ru
Compiled by Luba Schwartzman (luba7@bu.edu)
Research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and Policy
at Boston University

HEADLINES,
Friday, March 22, 2002

- The General Prosecutor's office of Ukraine has demanded the dispersal of the State Committee on Religious Affairs, after it registered the [anti-Russian] Kievan Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

- Several Ukrainian political parties, including former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine, has supported Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh's call to recognize the "Banderovtsy" -- members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought with the Germans against Russia -- as war heroes. Yushchenko's supporters also accused the Russian Foreign Ministry (which has criticized the initiative) of meddling in Ukraine's domestic affairs.

- Another round of Russian-American talks on strategic security was held in Geneva in preparation for US President George W. Bush's upcoming visit to Moscow.

- Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov is on a working visit in the Volgograd oblast. He visited wheat fields and met with members of the local administration.

- Prime Minister Kasyanov also announced that the US-Russian conflict about poultry imports has been solved. Only the best meat will be allowed into Russia.

- Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov told journalists about his meeting with officials from the Armenian Interior Ministry. He said that new procedures have been developed to make the search for suspected terrorists more effective.

- A large-scale special operation was conducted in Chechnya's Vedeno region. Federal forces destroyed a rebel camp. At the site of the camp they found a large ammunition dump with rifles, anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines, and a Soviet-time portable Igla air-defense system with an instruction manual in Arabic. FSB spokesman General Aleksandr Zdanovich said that a band of Georgian mercenaries was planning to use the camp, which was large enough for 80 people.

- A bridge over the Inguri River has become the unofficial border block-post between Georgia and Abkhazia.

- The two Interior Ministry officers implicated in the death of the Serigevo-Posadsky OMON (special-purpose police) have been acquitted.

- President Putin visited Krasnoyarsky Krai's Norilsk Nickel mines and metallurgic factory. He also stopped by the memorial complex at the Norillag labor camp, where almost half a million people were sent under Stalin.

- A Vietnamese gang that operated illegal telephone stations in Moscow has been exposed.

- A congress of "Armenians of Russia" has opened in Moscow.