World IN BRIEF : RUSSIA : Natural Gas Supplies for Baltics Cut Off

Russia has stopped delivering natural gas to all three Baltic states and will cut off other former Soviet republics that are not paying their bills, officials in Moscow said. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania owe a total of $57 million, Vyacheslav Sheremet, first deputy chairman of the Gasprom consortium, told the Itar-Tass news agency. Sergei Kazmin, a Gasprom duty officer, said the cutoff had nothing to do with a conflict over the rights of Russians in Estonia. Gas was cut off to Estonia on Friday, a day after President Boris N. Yeltsin compared Estonia’s treatment of ethnic Russians to apartheid.