2007 Review: March

RIA Novosti looks back at the main events of the outgoing year; below the month-by-month review of 2007 continues, with March

March 2

* Ramzan Kadyrov is approved as president of Chechnya by the Russian North Caucasus republic's parliament

March 3

* A coffin purported to contain the remains of Georgia's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1993, is discovered in Chechnya

March 4

* Georgia's breakaway province of Abkhazia holds parliamentary polls to elect a new 35-seat legislature, while the country's president Mikheil Saakashvili condemns the polls as illegitimate

March 7

* A U.S. jury finds a former high-ranking UN official, Russian diplomat Vladimir Kuznetsov, guilty of involvement in a conspiracy to launder money

March 8

* The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, votes to suspend nearly half of its technical assistance programs to Iran over the Islamic Republic's defiance of international demands to halt uranium enrichment  

March 15

* Russia, Bulgaria and Greece sign a long-delayed one billion-euro deal to build a 175-mile Burgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline, which will carry Russian oil to Europe, the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region

March 17

* Six people are killed and many injured in a crash that occurs as a passenger airliner makes an emergency landing in southern Russia

March 19

* The sixth round of long-running six-nation talks aiming to persuade North Korea to abandon nuclear research opens in Beijing, with the United States agreeing to unfreeze the reclusive Communist state's Macao bank accounts

March 20

* Reports suggest that 107 miners are dead in a methane blast that struck the recently opened Ulyanovskaya mine in west Siberia

* At least 62 people die in a fire at an old people's home in southern Russia and a further 35 people are rescued, the regional emergencies center said

March 23

* Iran detains 15 Royal Navy sailors and marines from HMS Cornwall in Iraqi territorial waters

March 25

* Armenia's Prime Minister and Chairman of the Republican Party Andranik Markaryan dies of heart attack

March 27

* Russian and Latvian Prime Ministers Mikhail Fradkov and Aigars Kalvitis sign a border treaty ending a drawn-out territorial dispute, and outline plans to ink an agreement on the status of Soviet military burials

March 29

* The U.S. Senate adopts a budget bill envisioning a stage-by-stage withdrawal of all combat units of the U.S. Armed Forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008