Armenian president pulls out of Moscow CIS summit

According to RIA Novosti, Kocharyan is the second leader to pull out of the July 21-22 informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose union of 11 post-Soviet nations.

Earlier in the day, Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili said he would not come. He was expected to use the event for talks with President Vladimir Putin on Georgian-Russian relations, strained by a controversy over the presence of Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

A source in Saakashvili's inner circle said a possible reason for the president's withdrawal was that the mooted meeting with Putin might not have taken place.

The upcoming summit will be the seventh informal "shirt-sleeves" meeting of CIS leaders since the organization was formed in December 1991.

It has no fixed agenda, but is expected to deal with reforms of the grouping's executive bodies as well as international developments of mutual concern. The Russian president will tell his CIS counterparts about the Group of Eight summit he hosted last weekend in a St. Petersburg suburb.

The CIS includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Turkmenistan gave up full membership of the club in 2005 and is now an associate member.