Russian

BUDYONNOVSK, Russia -- Russian troops today stormed a hospital where Chechen rebels had taken up to 2,000 people hostage, freeing at least 60, but the rebels put up a ferocious defense, officials and media reports said.Heavily armed commandos swarmed the building in this southern Russian town while firing automatic weapons, and Russian military helicopters and tanks joined the attack after heavy fighting erupted.News media reports said the rebels holed up in the hospital were firing back with automatic weapons and using their captives as human shields.

What is Russian cuisine? Caviar and blini, yes, but what else? To my mind, borscht, mushrooms, pickles, beef stroganoff, meat and cheese pies and dough pockets, anything with buckwheat, and almost anything with sour cream. Does Moscow Nights serve Russian food? It serves borscht, mushrooms, pickles, beef stroganoff, vereniki and pelmeni, blini (presumably of buckwheat), and bowls and bowls of sour cream. It does pretty well. (The blini come only with Russian black caviar, though -- $19.50 an ounce.

YOU CAN'T throw a snowball at the World Economic Forum in this ski resort without hitting a rejected Russian reformer.Early last week, Russia's reformist finance minister, Boris Fyodorov, walked into President Boris Yeltsin's office with a him-or-me ultimatum: Either fire the inflationary Central Bank chief, Victor Gerashchenko, who was on a ruble-printing binge to prop up inefficient industry, or I quit."

LONDON -- Astonishingly, since the apparent success of Boris Yeltsin's heart operation Russia has all but dropped off the lead pages of our newspapers. Does this mean that Russia, only recently described as ''disintegrating,'' ''mafia-ridden,'' even ''on the verge of another revolution,'' has found an equilibrium?Quite possibly. Russian efforts to find traction on the slippery surface of modern-day capitalistic economics now look rather auspicious. Some experts are even predicting growth rates that will better the high achievers in eastern Europe.

investigative reporter whose funeral yesterday attracted thousands, has, in a single stroke, brought corruption to the center of national attention here and deeply shaken the Russian government.Sickened by the violence and flagrant abuse of office that have fallen upon their country, an overflow crowd turned out to grieve for Mr. Kholodov and to deliver a rebuke to those who killed him with a bomb planted in a briefcase.Demonstrators at his funeral, who included many leaders of the democratic reform movement, called for the ouster of Gen. Pavel Grachev, the defense minister.

With his stocky shoulders and hooded eyes, Oleg Kalugin looks every inch the Russian spy he was for 32 years. Indeed, Kalugin eventually rose to the top of the KGB, or Committee for State Security, as head of its First Directorate, responsible for planting spies and creating havoc in the United States. He lives in the Washington area. One of Kalugin's life-long comrades in espionage was Yevgeny M. Primakov, whom Boris Yeltsin recently named as prime minister to defuse an explosive showdown with the communists.

In the five years he has been in the international spotlight, Boris Yeltsin has rightly gained a reputation for being a dynamic, forceful, brave, at times even reckless figure who will take strong actions to get things done.The latest example of his bold style was his performance in Washington at the first Russian-American summit of the post-Communist period. Mr. Yeltsin not only made a historic and very dramatic strategic-arms reduction which severely diminishes a key area of Russian nuclear capability, but he went further by announcing before a joint session of the U.S. Congress that he was unilaterally removing all the long-range SS-18 missiles now targeted on the United States.

WASHINGTON -- China is engaged in an extensive effort to buy advanced military hardware from hard-strapped Russian defense industries and to obtain technology from Russian scientists, say concerned U.S. officials and some Russian and Chinese defense specialists.In a major effort by China to modernize its military capability, the country is in some instances buying military supplies by dealing directly with individual factories throughout Russia, rather than by going through Moscow.The Russian supplies are in some cases enabling China to get sophisticated military technology that it has been unable to buy from the West since the Bush administration clamped down on sales of such technology to China after the Beijing massacre of 1989, observers say.The most visible part of the new Russian-Chinese military cooperation was a sale recently completed by Russia to China of 24 Sukhoi-27 warplanes, aircraft that are far more advanced than anything the Chinese air force previously owned.

THE LONG THAW between Washington and Moscow is visibly ending. Washington charges that Russia is reneging on arms-control agreements. Yevgeny M. Primakov, the ex-KGB head who replaced pro-Western Andrei V. Kozyrev as foreign minister, threatens to renege even harder and denounces Western hypocrisy and greed in the good old-fashioned way. Boris N. Yeltsin fires Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais, one of the last committed reformers in his Cabinet, and...

ODESSA, Ukraine -- If the potent forces of frustrated nationalism, economic distress and political division continue unchecked in Ukraine, what happened here April 10 could someday be remembered as the Fort Sumter of the Black Sea War.Late that day, Ukrainian airborne commandos stormed the small Russian-controlled navy base here, ousted Russian officers' families from their homes at gunpoint, ransacked their apartments and took control of the base....