SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1393 (57), Friday, July 25, 2008
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TITLE: Storchak Makes Plea In Letter
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Pleas for justice or clemency are nothing new from the thousands of people in the country awaiting trial in detention at any point in time, but Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak has couched his appeal in the language of Christian ethics and national interests.
Storchak, under investigation for the attempted embezzlement of $43.4 million of state funds, said in a letter published in the newspaper Gazeta on Wednesday that, in the eight months he has been behind bars, he has not even had the benefit of a proper questioning.
In the letter, he also described the charges against him, which have been broadly seen as a chapter in an ongoing feud between Kremlin clans, as a “calculated move directed against state interests.”
Storchak’s boss, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, said Wednesday that he believed in his integrity and imminent return to the ministry.
“Regretfully, even after eight months of being held in custody, I have no idea when they plan to really start working with me, meaning asking questions and taking down my answers,” Storchak said in the letter, referring to the Investigative Committee.
“Is this Christian? Is it legal not to listen to an accused party for eight months? Is it fair that they have limited themselves to studying the conclusions of experts closely tied to the probe?” Storchak wrote.
Igor Pastukhov, Storchak’s lawyer, refused to comment on the letter Wednesday, as did the Investigative Committee press service.
Storchak, who oversaw foreign debt negotiations in the Finance Ministry, was arrested on November 15 and charged with fraud a week later. According to investigators, Storchak teamed up with Sodexim company head Viktor Zakharov and two bankers from the Interregional Investment Bank in an attempt to embezzle $43.4 million from the federal budget. Investigators said they tried to channel the money to Sodexim under the guise of compensation for losses the company suffered as the result of a decision to write off Algerian debt to Russia. The other three men also remain in custody.
If convicted, Storchak faces a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
In December, the Investigative Committee opened another probe into Storchak’s activities, alleging corrupt dealings in debt negotiations with Kuwait. The Prosecutor General’s Office, to which the Investigative Committee formally answers, demanded that the investigation be closed a few days later, but the committee complied only last month.
The Storchak case is believed to be a byproduct of a fierce power struggle between the so-called St. Petersburg economists, led by Kudrin, and the siloviki, or individuals with close ties to the security services — the two main groupings associated with the country’s two main political figures, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The semiautonomous Investigative Committee, led by Alexander Bastrykin, a former classmate of Putin’s, is often seen as one of the weapons wielded by the siloviki in exerting their power.
Storchak wrote that his arrest had already had negative financial ramifications, disrupting debt negotiations with Libya and South Korea, resulting in losses for the federal budget.
“I have every grounds to believe that this action was directed against national interests,” he wrote, without identifying anyone as being behind the move.
The Finance Ministry ignored an inquiry Wednesday about possible economic harm caused by Storchak’s arrest, while a number of business analysts surveyed said the arrest had no visible impact on financial markets or investor perception of the country.
“While such issues are not of sufficient magnitude to drive investors away in isolation, they do justify a slightly higher risk premium and therefore a hit on valuations,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib.

TITLE: Conned Investors Demand Action From City
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two women who had been on a hunger strike since Monday with a group of nine other local investors in off-plan residential property developments were sent to a hospital in separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday.
The off-plan residential property investors, or dolshchiki as they are known colloquially in Russian, who had paid for apartments in buildings under construction, are demanding action from City Hall after the apartments were sold to third parties or construction was never completed.
The hunger strike is taking place at the St. Petersburg office of the liberal political party Yabloko at 46, Ulitsa Mayakovskogo, where the investors have settled in a room with inflatable mattresses and a supply of bottled water.
“None of us are well: we are living in a state of permanent stress,” Yelena Malysheva, one of the hospitalized protesters had told reporters at the start of the strike. Malysheva had paid a construction company for a one-room apartment but never received the keys.
Maxim Reznik, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko, said he agrees with the protestors that the authorities should help investors left high and dry by unscrupulous developers.
“Yes, everyone who gets involved with a swindler can be blamed for being short-sighted and careless,” Reznik said. “The thing is, however, that the local government has allowed these swindlers to set up their agencies. It even licensed them and let them operate on the market by ripping people off. Naturally, the state now has to share the responsibility.”
One of the most common ways to buy an apartment in a residential block that is under construction in Russia is to sign an investment contract and pay by installments.
But large numbers of off-plan investors across the country have been caught in limbo, being trapped by various kinds of scams on the part of construction firms.
Construction companies may ask investors for extra, unplanned payments amounting to tens of thousands of rubles; despite providing full or partial payment, the investors may discover that what they thought they had bought had already been sold to another person already claiming ownership; construction is stopped due to lack of funds; or rogue firms make off with the money before an apartment block is completed.
This week’s hunger strike is one of a series that have taken place in recent years, with the last held in the spring of 2007. The method has so far failed to make an impression on Governor Valentina Matviyenko — the main target of the protests — who has maintained that this kind of argument must only be decided in court.
The strike’s participants represent a protest committee that unites almost 1,000 local victims of various construction scams.
The hunger strikers — many of whom have been trying to resolve their conflicts for several years — stress that the issue takes political will to solve, and that going to court and paying lawyers does not always help. For example, when investors from the regions buying in Moscow appeal to the Moscow authorities, they typically get bounced back to their home cities and asked to settle their problems locally, striker Natalya Dunayeva said.
“It is essential that the state takes care of the victims first and then goes after the swindlers,” said hunger striker Lyudmila Landina.
Natalya Yevdokimova, an advisor to Sergei Mironov, head of the Federation Council, and former head of the Social Affairs Commission of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said a series of frequently used scam schemes exists to cheat the investors and blamed the City Hall for turning a blind eye on the problem.
“The authorities are trying to portray the investors as being careless and getting involved with an irresponsible agency before taking all the necessary precautions,” Yevdokimova said. “The truth is, however, that the authorities are responsible for the plight of investors because they failed to protect property rights of city residents and allowed construction scams to flourish.”
Yevdokimova urged City Hall to follow steps taken by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and the Moscow city government, which used city budget money to complete unfinished construction projects and intervened in construction disputes identical or similar to those in St. Petersburg.
The investors have secured the support of the St. Petersburg ombudsman Igor Mikhailov, a politician with the ruling United Russia party, who has already appealed to Matviyenko to meet with the protesters and discuss the issue with them directly.
“I must draw particular emphasis to the fact that the people who went on this hunger strike are not entrepreneurs who sought to buy up numbers of properties for a subsequent profit; rather, they are in a clear need of improving their own living conditions,” Mikhailov said.
Matviyenko directed the strikers to a specially created City Hall commission led by the Vice Governor Lyudmila Kostkina. Speaking to reporters at City Hall this week, Kostkina said that most of the investors who went on hunger strike never contacted her commission, and claimed that everyone who had done so had been offered help.
The investors disagree. Hunger striker Svetlana Fait, who had approached Kostkina’s commission and was offered what she called “compensation so small that it is useless,” feels she and other investors have been trapped up in a vicious circle. 
Fait shares a room in a communal apartment with her mother and daugher.
“Kostkina offers inadequate solutions, either in the form of modest compensation that is not comparable with the sums we have lost, or rental agreements that have nothing to do with ownership,” she said. “This commission apparently operates by imitating action for the sake of the governor, rather than offering real help to us.”

TITLE: Energy Partnership Focus for Venezuelan President
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave the go-ahead for expanded operations by Russian oil companies and called for an energy alliance with Moscow during an appearance with President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday, but he saved a personal invitation to visit Caracas for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 
During the first leg of his European tour, the outspoken, anti-U.S. leader also held talks on purchasing Russian arms and said the world should jettison the U.S. dollar in favor of the Russian ruble. 
“We can say that Russia and Venezuela have achieved a strategic alliance in the energy sphere,” Chavez said after talks with Medvedev at Maiendorf Castle, his residence outside Moscow, in comments posted on the Kremlin’s web site. “We’ve been slowly traveling this path for the past five or six years and today signed agreements that will allow us strengthen our cooperation in this direction.” 
Chavez’s first meeting with Medvedev since he took office in May offered a very different focus from his talks with Putin in 2006. Then, the deals involved the sale of 24 fighter jets and 53 helicopters to Venezuela, and the two addressed a news conference in the Kremlin. 
This time, the Kremlin’s focus was on the signing of broad energy deals, including one with TNK-BP, while playing down the ongoing arms talks. Only a limited number of reporters were admitted to cover the meeting at the Maiendorf Castle, fueling speculation that Chavez’s anti-U.S. rhetoric was uncomfortable for a Kremlin trying to promote Russia as a more reliable partner for the West. 
Russia’s relationship with Colombia, whose Vice President Francisco Santos met with Medvedev on a visit to the country last month, makes dealing with Chavez more difficult, as Colombia has accused Venezuela of funding anti-government FARC guerrillas there. 
“Relations between Russia and Venezuela have become more complicated,” Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib Capital, said in e-mailed comments from London. “Going forward, given Medvedev’s ambition to create a diversified and open economy, balancing international political and economic relationships is going to be a lot more complicated than it used be.” 
Emil Dabagyan, a senior political analyst at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Latin America Institute, said there was a logic to Russia’s arms deals with Chavez, calling them an “assymetrical answer” to U.S. plans to install an anti-missile shield in Europe. 
Talks are under way to sell Venezuela air defense systems and military aircraft, along with other weapons. Mikhail Dmitriyev, director of the Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, participated in Tuesday’s talks, said his first deputy, Alexander Fomin. 
“An active discussion of issues is under way,” Fomin said by phone. Russia has sold Venezuela $3.5 billion worth of arms in recent years, and Russian press reports have said it is looking for sales of $2 billion more. 
Fomin said the final price tag might be different and that he was hoping that “some sort of a framework agreement will be signed.” 
National news broadcasts showed Chavez and Medvedev beaming together, but Chavez seemed to save his warmest words on Tuesday for the man he calls his “friend Vladimir.” 
Meeting later in the day, the two addressed each other in the familiar “ty” manner, with Chavez congratulating Putin on leaving office “with his head high” and saying he wanted to know when Putin would visit him in Venezuela. 
Chavez cultivated warm personal ties with Putin during five previous visits to Russia.

TITLE: Ravenous Pack of Bears Eats Two in Kamchatka
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A pack of enormous bears searching for food killed and ate two men at mines in Russia’s Pacific Kamchatka region and have kept hundreds of geologists and miners from reaching the mine, news agencies reported Wednesday.
A pack of up to 30 Kamchatka bears — which are similar to grizzlies — prowled around two mines of a local platinum mining company where they killed the two guards on Thursday, local officials were quoted by the Russian ITAR-Tass news agency as saying.
About 400 company workers have refused to return to the mines for fear of the bears, which stand 10 feet tall on their hind legs and weigh up to 1,500 pounds, Interfax reported.
About 10 bears have also been seen near the village of Khailino sniffing fish remains and other garbage.
Village official Viktor Leushkin was quoted by ITAR-Tass as saying that a team of hunters will be dispatched to shoot or chase off the bears.
“These predators have to be destroyed,” Leushkin was quoted as saying. “Once they kill a human, they will do it again and again.”
Rampant fish poaching in the Kamchatka tundra often forces the bears to seek other sources of food, such as garbage. Bears frequently attack humans in the scarcely populated peninsular region.

TITLE: Nevzlin’s Prosecutors Call For Life Sentence
AUTHOR: By Yelena Shuster
PUBLISHER: Special to The Moscow Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors on Wednesday demanded life imprisonment for former Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin, who is being tried in absentia on multiple murder charges dating back to the late 1990s.
Nevzlin, who fled to Israel in 2003, faces 11 charges, including murder and attempted murder, following a four-year investigation led by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Prosecutor Alexander Koblyakov asked the Moscow City Court on Wednesday to convict the self-exiled businessman and sentence him to life in prison, Interfax reported.
Nevzlin’s lawyer, Dmitry Kharitonov, declined to comment when reached Wednesday. Nevzlin’s defense is to address the court Thursday, Interfax said.
Nevzlin has dismissed the charges as baseless and politically motivated. His Israel-based spokesman, Eric Wolf, described the trial as “one monstrous breach of human rights.”
“The case is fabricated and a clear-cut example of political persecution,” Wolf said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
In May, Israel’s Supreme Court of Justice upheld Nevzlin’s citizenship and ruled that the Russian charges are groundless, according to a copy of the ruling obtained by The Moscow Times.
Nevzlin is charged with ordering the killing of several business executives and officials from 1998 to 2004, and his trial is closely linked to that of Alexei Pichugin, the oil firm’s former security chief, who was jailed for life last August on charges of involvement in the same murders.
According to the charges, Nevzlin is accused of being behind the killing of Valentina Korneyeva, a Moscow businesswoman, and Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk. 
Yukos, once the country’s biggest oil company, was forced into bankruptcy in 2006 by back tax charges that many say were politically motivated.
Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, are currently serving prison sentences of eight years on tax and fraud charges.

TITLE: Medvedev Admits Posts for Sale
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday publicly acknowledged that government posts are sometimes up for sale and vowed to tackle the problem by handpicking bureaucrats and senior officials in the regions.
“Sometimes decisions about filling positions are made on the basis of acquaintance, personal allegiance or, even worse, for money — that is, offices can be bought,” Medvedev said in televised comments. 
Medvedev, who has said confronting rampant corruption will be a priority of his presidency, told Kremlin officials at his residence outside Moscow that the practice did not jibe with his vision of modern Russia. “Russia is a democracy, not a medieval tyranny,” he said.
He added that recruiting leaders is a particularly difficult task in the regions, which he described as suffering a “famine of personnel.” The problem applies to regional leaders, Medvedev said, using a sports metaphor to describe the shortage of qualified candidates.
“There is no bench with substitute players,” Medvedev said. “Every time we have to rack our brains over how to find candidates for higher office in the regions.”
Medvedev said he would handpick top candidates for regional government posts to form a “presidential reserve.”

TITLE: Fidel Castro Says No Excuses From Cuba on Bomber Issue
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: HAVANA — Fidel Castro said Havana owed no apologies to Washington over reports that Russia might start flying long-range bombers to Cuba, and warned that his country “had nerves of steel in times of genocide”.
It was the first official comment from the Americas’ only one-party communist government since a US general responded to a report in a Russian newspaper, warning Russia against basing nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba.
“What we need are nerves of steel in times of genocide, and Cuba has them. The United States knows that,” he wrote, in what appeared to be a reference to previous Cold War era confrontations between the two countries.
The flights, although they have not yet been officially announced by Moscow, have already sparked tensions reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s.
The ailing Fidel Castro, 81, who in February handed over power to his 77-year-old brother Raul, made his comments in a letter to cubadebate.cu on Wednesday.
“Raul did just the right thing by maintaining appropriate silence on statements published Monday July 21 by Izvestia, related to potential installation of strategic Russian bomber bases in our country,” he wrote.
Fidel Castro said the news arose from “hypotheses developed in Russia due to Yankee (US) stubbornness about the idea of setting up radar and a missile shield near the border of that great power.”
US General Norton Schwartz, nominated to be the air force’s chief of staff, said in Washington Tuesday that if Russia “did, I think we should stand strong and indicate that is something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line for the United States of America.”
The elder Castro has been sidelined by a major intestinal illness two years ago and now spends a lot of his time writing political essays.
In his latest, headlined “Machiavelli’s Strategy”, he said that with the United States: “if you say yes, I’ll kill you. If you say no, it doesn’t matter, I’ll kill you anyway. That is the Machiavellian strategy the United States uses with Cuba.”

TITLE: 3 Sentenced for Fire in Strip Club
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Three men were found guilty Wednesday in the deaths of 10 people in a fire at the 911 VIP strip club in Moscow in March 2007.
The Tverskoi District Court ruled that Sergei Cherkasov, 42, the former general director of KlabMarket, had violated fire regulations and found him guilty of criminal negligence causing multiple deaths.
The court sentenced Cherkasov to three years in prison, after which he will be barred from the management of any institution or organization, the Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
The court also convicted two bartenders at the club, Alexander Kosobutsky, 28, and Sergei Yeremenko, 26, of the same charge and of the added charge of causing major destruction of property through reckless disregard for fire safety, sentencing each to 3 1/2 years behind bars, the report said.
The blaze caused more than 2 million rubles (then about $75,000) worth of damage to public property.
The blaze that swept through the club was started when the two bartenders decided to provide a fiery accompaniment to waitresses dancing on the bar. Kosobutsky set fire to an ashtray full of alcohol on the bar and Yeremenko threw in a lighter, which then exploded.
Six men and four women were killed in the ensuing fire, and eight were taken to the hospital with burns and smoke inhalation. Many of those who died choked on toxic fumes on the club’s second floor, where private booths were located.
Media reports at the time said neither the fire alarm nor extinguishers at the club were functional.

TITLE: Rumored Lenta Bidders Play Cards Close to Chest
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The owners of the St. Petersburg-based hypermarket chain Lenta will sell an 89-percent stake that includes all of the shareholders’ shares except for those held by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The global retail giants Wal-Mart and Carrefour and the American investment fund TPG Capital are among the companies bidding  for control of the Russian retailer chain stores.
The tender was initiated in spring by Lenta’s founder, Oleg Zherebtsov, and his U.S.-born partner August Meyer, who own a combined 70 percent of the company and have been locked in a shareholders’ dispute for almost half a year. 
In January, Zherebtsov sued Meyer and the case was heard at the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court.  
In April, the warring owners eventually reached a compromise and cooperated in seeking new sources of funding for the firm, as a result of which the company was sold. The deadline for offers from prospective buyers was initially scheduled for July 18, but according to a source in the company, bids are expected until July 25 and the sale will be held early August. 
Zherebtsov’s financial interests in the deal are represented by ABN Amro, while Meyer is being advised by Renaissance Capital analysts. Both parties declined to comment. 
The EBRD, which owns an 11-percent stake purchased in 2007 for $125 million, is not taking part in the tender. 
The deal is unique for the Russian retail market, since the hypermarket chain will most likely be sold to a western player, in spite of the fact that Russia’s largest retail chain, X5, had previously expressed interest in merging with Lenta. 
“If Lenta’s owners offered us the opportunity to do such a deal, we would consider it,” X5’s chairman and chief executive Lev Khasis said in an interview.
But in May, Zherebtsov denied reports on the forthcoming sale of the company. 
As an established business, Lenta is being targeted by several companies and funds, including global giants Wal-Mart and Carrefour, Germany’s Metro Group, France’s Auchan, Croatia’s Agrokor Group and Finland’s Kesko, along with BC-Partners and TPG, the Russian daily Vedomosti reported. 
The director of Governmental and International Affairs at Metro Cash & Carry in Russia, Oksana Tokoreva, denied that Metro Group would take part in the tender.  
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, which has a representative office in Russia but no retail outlets in the country, declined to comment on the rumors.
Auchan’s Russian Branch and Kesko officials also declined to comment, while representatives of Agrokor and BC Partners could not be reached for comment. 
Thomas Choutin, Assets and Development Director for Russia of Carrefour, which is number one in Europe and number two worldwide, confirmed to Vedomosti that the company is exploring the opportunity of purchasing a retail store network in Russia, but avoided speaking about it in detail.  
A minority shareholder of Lenta, who spoke on condition of confidentiality, expects that financial funds will buy the shares. The estimated cost will reach around $1.8-$2.2 billion, according to Yulia Gordeyeva, an analyst at IMG group insurance company.
“The battle to purchase Lenta will be tense, as this is a well-established hypermarket chain with clear goals and a catchy brand name,” said Gordeyeva. “Since it is the fastest-growing segment in the Russian market, it might be attractive for international investment companies.”
Market analysts predict that as soon as most of the stakes have been acquired by new owners, the brand name will be changed along with the company’s development strategy, which might involve a further resale of the company.  
Lenta chain store currently includes 31 hypermarkets, with 14 in St. Petersburg, and the remainder in other major Russian cities. The company’s revenues after VAT were $1.5 billion in 2007.

TITLE: Khristenko Pulls Out of Talks With Finns On Timber Laws
AUTHOR: By Marianna Tishchenko
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko has canceled a planned meeting with Finnish officials this weekend intended to ease tensions over Russian timber duties and cross-border transportation problems, the Finnish government said Wednesday.
The dispute was highlighted at an EU-Russia summit in Khanty-Mansiisk last month, with Finnish and European Union officials criticizing Russia’s decision in April to raise export duties on timber and plans to raise them by an additional 80 percent next year. 
The canceled visit came a day after the World Wildlife Fund, a multinational conservation organization, wrote in a report that Russia constituted the world’s largest source of illegal timber.
The country is also in the lead in terms of the quantity of illegal wood being sent to the EU, said Anke Shulmeister, WWF’s forest policy officer. Russia exported more than 10 million cubic meters of illegally logged timber to the European market in 2006, she said.
Yelena Kulikova, director of the fund’s forestry program in Russia, said the situation had not changed substantially since then. The Forestry Code “ignores the issues of legality or illegality of Russian wood and fails to address control operations,” Kulikova said.
In May, the Federal Forestry Agency submitted to the State Duma a list of proposed amendments to the Forestry Code, she said, adding that only a few “relatively insignificant” amendments had been approved so far. 
She said she did not expect the Duma to get to all of the amendments until September or October, when most of the deputies will be back from vacation.
A spokesperson at the Federal Forestry Agency declined to comment on the WWF report. Calls to the Industry and Trade Ministry went unanswered Wednesday.
Because of the impasse, a number of European companies, in cooperation with the WWF, have taken it upon themselves to mitigate the problem.
“Members of the Finnish Forest Industries Federation are cooperating with WWF Russia and WWF Finland to improve the wood-tracking system in Russia,” said Anders Portin, Finnish Forest Industries Federation senior vice president.
He added that the federation was working to tighten logging regulations in Russia, from where its member companies, which together comprise 90 percent of the Finnish forestry industry, import 16 percent of their wood.
Finnish timber companies are especially eager to curb illegal logging, as they expect a significant increase in the demand for domestic wood because of Russia’s plans to further raise the wood export duties next year.
“We have to do everything possible so that this key industry sector can function in Finland,” Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said at a news conference Wednesday, Reuters reported. Vanhanen’s press service confirmed his comments by telephone. 
The EU has taken several measures against illegal logging, though the report predicts that flawed legislation, which fails to account for a large number of products made from illegal wood, will allow 90 percent of illegal wood imports to continue to enter the EU.

TITLE: Booming Auto Sales Help Infrastructure
AUTHOR: By Boris Kamchev and Jeremy Ventuso
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Experts and consultancy agencies are unanimous — Russia is becoming the most important automobile market in the world. The country overtook Germany as Europe’s biggest auto market in the first half of this year as sales rose 41 percent to 1.65 million cars, swollen by demand for models from U.S. and Asian manufacturers, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
 Between January and June 2008, Russians spent $33.8 billion on 1.65 million cars, compared to 1.63 million vehicles in Germany.
Experts predict that Russian auto sales could reach 3.8 million this year if the present level of growth is sustained. The country currently accounts for 12 percent of the total global auto market, and by 2015, the country’s car sales are expected to account for one fifth of global sales growth, or a maximum 6 million cars per year. 
“Sales will continue to grow at this pace for two or three years as rising incomes fuel demand,” Mikhail Pak, an automotive analyst at IFC Metropol in Moscow, was cited by Bloomberg as saying.
Many analysts have suggested that the growth in car sales is due to soaring property prices in Russia — younger Russians, (aged 27-40), are choosing to apply for loans to buy cars instead of for mortgages.
Dozen of foreign automakers have already opened factories in Russia or operate in joint ventures, Peugeot Citroen of France and Toyota Motor being the latest examples. Peugeot, Europe’s second-biggest car company after Volkswagen, last month began work with Mitsubishi Motors of Japan on a $732 million plant near Moscow to supply sport utility vehicles and medium-sized cars, and Toyota, the world’s No. 2 after General Motors, opened a Camry sedan assembly line near St. Petersburg last December.
Russians are also trying to develop the production of their domestic brands, which is outnumbered by the booming demand for foreign models. Ladas and Volgas are still produced, but sales of these traditional Soviet cars are stable only in the provinces and small towns of Russia.
The main obstacles facing Russia’s auto market are poor road infrastructure and a lack of parking lots, which result in constant traffic jams and numerous car accidents in crowded cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. After a surplus was announced in the federal budget, plans were announced two months ago by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to build a new road infrastructure and reconstruct the existent infrastructure. 
According to observers, the first phase will see a new highway connect Moscow to the northwest region, including St. Petersburg. Another highway is planned to stretch through the southern parts of Russia to the Olympic city of Sochi on the Black Sea.
“Government spending on improving transport infrastructure will also be an important factor in stimulating demand for cars,” said Pak.
Growing sales of foreign cars is also an indicator of the booming Chinese auto market. Fast cars have proven popular with young Chinese businessmen, with Mercedes Benz leading the market. By May 2007, the German carmaker had sold more than 300 of its sport models there, Bloomberg reported. 
Contrary to Russia and China, the demand for cars in the West has stagnated amid the global economic meltdown. This month, General Motors announced that it was suspending dividend payments and making cutbacks in America where sales have fallen by 16 percent. 
“In other developed countries this market is growing, at best, only slightly each year. The current economic conditions, characterized by high oil prices and the credit crunch, do not facilitate global automotive market development,” said Stanley Root, a partner at PWC’s automotive practice.

¦? The first in a series of new terminals designed to increase the volume of cars carried by rail across the country was unveiled 90 kilometers south of Moscow on Wednesday.
Double-decker car transporters loaded with KIA hatchbacks on both levels were on display at the $50 million Mikhnevo terminal. The wagons are the first of their kind in Russia and are essential to the logistical concept behind the new network of terminals, since they will allow more cars to be delivered more quickly and efficiently through Russian Railways’ network.
“This will help take pressure off the overburdened roads by shifting more freight traffic onto our railway network,” said Viktor Ivanov, general director of RailTransAuto, the company that is setting up the terminals.
A spokeswoman for RTA said the Mikhnevo depot can currently store about 5,300 cars. 
There are seven other hubs in the intended network, including one in St. Petersburg. The other terminals are scheduled to open in the next few months.

TITLE: AAR Tells Dudley He Is Personally Liable
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — BP’s billionaire partners in TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, have told Chief Executive Officer Robert Dudley to cut spending by about $900 million or “personally” face demands for compensation.
AAR, which represents the interests of TNK-BP’s Russian billionaire shareholders, wants Dudley to limit capital expenditures to $3.5 billion this year rather than about $4.4 billion estimated in the venture’s business plan, according to a letter dated July 15 and obtained Thursday by Bloomberg News.
BP is struggling for control of the 50-50 joint venture with Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik, who have called for Dudley’s removal, as well as criticized TNK-BP’s share price and returns. BP has praised the oil venture’s performance, saying development costs per barrel are the lowest in Russia. TNK-BP invested about $3.5 billion last year.
“AAR reserves the right to seek all available remedies against you personally,” AAR CEO Stan Polovets wrote in the letter. “You have failed to act in the best interests of all shareholders, and as a 50% owner of the company, AAR is entitled to seek compensation for losses caused by your actions.”
Marina Dracheva, a spokeswoman for TNK-BP, declined to comment, saying only that this is a matter for shareholders.
Dudley, who has led TNK-BP since its inception in 2003, said in July 2007 that capital spending may rise to as much as $4.5 billion this year as the company aims to maintain output at aging fields and revive production overall with new projects. The billionaires have said TNK-BP’s priority is adding oil and gas reserves to the benefit of BP, rather than pumping more oil from the ground and increasing refining capacity.
TNK-BP’s reserves-to-production ratio of more than 16 years is high for the industry and a sign management should accelerate output, Polovets said Thursday by telephone from Aspen, Colorado, confirming the authenticity of the letter.
BP, which estimates Russia’s reserves-to-production ratio at 21.8 years, has defended most of TNK-BP’s spending plan.
“We’ve seen that AAR are now suggesting that the company should reduce its investment, which surprises us,” Alastair Graham, head of BP Russian Investments, told Bloomberg Television last week. “We think this company has a great portfolio of investment projects.”
TNK-BP’s shareholders agreed to delay a $1.8 billion dividend this year after the cost of borrowing rose because of turmoil in the credit markets, Polovets said on Sunday.
Russia, the world’s second-biggest crude exporter, faces its first annual drop in oil production in a decade.
On Thursday Dudley left the country as he ran into bureaucratic problems amid the shareholder dispute.
“Dudley has temporarily left Russia to run the company from outside the country,’’ TNK-BP said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.
Dudley, a U.S. citizen, has faced problems renewing his visa as TNK-BP’s billionaire shareholders demand his dismissal.
On Wednesday, a Siberian court ruled that BP employees could not work for TNK-BP, a day after the British firm announced that it would reassign its remaining foreign specialists from the country.
The Tyumen Regional Arbitration Court decided in favor of Tetlis, a minority shareholder in the company’s publicly traded unit, annulling an agreement that had allowed BP to assign foreign support staff to TNK-BP.
The 60 employees had been prevented from working at TNK-BP since March, initially by an injunction from the Tyumen court. After that was lifted, BP says, they were blocked by TNK-BP security personnel from entering the building.
Another 88 BP employees — mostly engineers and technicians — left Russia in mid-July after no end to the dispute appeared in sight.
A BP spokesman in Moscow said the company would contest Wednesday’s ruling in an arbitration appeals court in Omsk.
“This decision is not binding, because it’s not final,” the BP spokesman said. “Like anywhere else in the world where the legal system functions, we have the right to appeal.

(Bloomberg, SPT)

TITLE: Turkey Warms To Russia
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ISTANBUL — Turkey wants to boost cooperation with Russia, its top gas supplier, ending a frosty period marked by differences over the Nabucco pipeline to Europe, an official and analysts said. 
Turkey gets most of its gas — 68 percent of 2008 demand of 38 billion cubic meters — from Gazprom under three long-term deals. 
NATO-member Turkey and Russia had a decade-long lull in economic relations after Ankara blamed Moscow for selling gas to them at more expensive rates than to other buyers. 
They were also at loggerheads after Turkey backed four European countries on the 7.9 billion euro ($12.6 billion) Nabucco pipeline project planned to carry gas from the Caspian and Iran to Europe from 2013 to lessen Europe’s dependence on Russia. 
But a senior Turkish Energy Ministry source said the two countries were now talking again. 
“A path has now been opened to doing business on several critical projects,” said the source, who asked for anonymity. 
Russia had said any pipeline project without its gas was doomed to fail and challenged Nabucco by broaching the South Stream project, which plans a pipeline to Bulgaria and Italy from Russia via the Black Sea. The source said the two countries agreed during Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev’s visit to Ankara last week to set up a joint company to run Turkey’s urban gas grids. 
They also agreed to build an underground gas storage facility in central Turkey and have talks to renew a gas contract expiring in 2011. 
“Gazprom’s offer also includes the extension of the Blue Stream pipeline to Israel,” he said, referring to the 1,200-kilometer line that pumps 16 bcm of gas to Ankara through the Black Sea. 
Sinan Ogan, of the Ankara-based think tank Turksam, said Turkey and Russia were now in a “new period of cooperation. 
“The rivalry between South Stream and Nabucco has been to the detriment of both countries. But now Russia may be invited to take part in the Nabucco project during the planned visit by the Russian president to Turkey,” he said. 
Yurdakul Yigitguden, a Turkey-based energy adviser, said the “warmer period in bilateral relations” could end with Russia supplying “10 to 20 percent of the Nabucco’s gas capacity,” which is planned at 30 bcm annually. “Gazprom may apply the same model it has in several European countries. It wants to participate in [Turkey’s] downstream business,” he said. 
The Turkish Energy Ministry source said that apart from extending Blue Stream gas to Israel, Gazprom will also consider its oil arm, Gazprom Neft, supplying oil to the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline, proposed by Turkey’s Calik and Italy’s Eni, between Turkey’s Black Sea and the Mediterranean. 
Also on the table is a project, described by some analysts as “fantasy,” which envisions carrying fiber optic cables, water, electricity and Russian gas and oil through a multipurpose pipeline from Turkey to Israel. 
Turkey’s energy minister, Hilmi Guler, said last week that Russia, Turkey and Israel would work on this “Mediterranean Line” project, which could later be extended as far as India.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Karusel Deal Examined</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s Anti-Monopoly Service may question X5 Retail Group NV’s purchase of superstore chain Karusel, RBC Daily reported, citing Timofei Nizhegorodtsev, head of the service’s trade department.
X5, Russia’s biggest food retailer, said Wednesday it would appeal requirements imposed by the regulator regarding the takeover because they have “no legal ground.” If X5 were to win, the service may argue in court that the acquisition was illegal because it might limit competition in the St. Petersburg region, where Karusel is based, Nizhegorodtsev told the newspaper.

<b>Prokhorov to Invest</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov plans to invest $10 billion in Russian metal deposits acquired from former partner Vladimir Potanin, betting the global commodities rally will continue.
Prokhorov will invest the money in a dozen projects over the next five years as he seeks to become Russia’s second-biggest producer of nickel and titanium and a major miner of gold and copper, said Dmitry Razumov, CEO of Prokhorov’s Onexim Holdings.
Commodities including oil, gold, nickel and copper have reached all-time highs in the last 14 months on surging demand from emerging markets, stoking inflation around the globe.

<b>SuperJet Gets Credit</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Eurasian Development Bank, a Russian-Kazakh joint venture, approved a 10-year, $100 million credit line for Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Co.’s SuperJet project.
The money will be used to build planes for test flights and to finance production and marketing of Russia’s first post-Soviet passenger jet, the Almaty-based bank said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
Sukhoi Civil Aircraft has 98 “firm orders” for the SuperJet, the bank said.

<b>Evraz Wins Over BasEl</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Evraz Group, Russia’s second-largest steelmaker by volume, won the right to develop a coal field in Siberia, beating billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element among other contenders.
A unit of Evraz bid the most for the Mezhegeyskoye deposit, Alexei Ivanov, head of investor relations at Moscow-based Evraz, said by phone Thursday.
Evraz coal unit Yuzhkuzbassugol paid 16.9 billion rubles ($732 million) for the deposit, Interfax said, citing an unidentified representative of a company involved in the auction.

<b>Comstar Set to Expand</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Comstar United Telesystems, a telecommunications company owned by Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, has received codes for long-distance calls that will allow it to expand the range of services.
Communications and Mass Media Minister Igor Shchegolev has signed off on the codes for Comstar, his spokeswoman Yelena Lashkina said by phone from Moscow on Thursday. 
Comstar, which has more than 3.6 million fixed-line subscribers in households of the Russian capital through Moscow City Telephone and offers broadband Internet, plans to strengthen its corporate segment.

TITLE: Relaunching the Missile Debate
AUTHOR: By Richard Weitz
TEXT: The debate between the United States and Russia over U.S. plans to deploy a ballistic missile-defense system in Europe is heating up again. Persistent differences with Poland over its conditions for accepting defensive interceptor missiles have led U.S. officials to hint that they might even consider Lithuania as an alternative deployment site. This shift appears aimed at pressuring Poland into showing greater flexibility in the negotiations, but the idea of Washington establishing military bases in a country that was once part of the Soviet Union has raised the Kremlin’s ire. 
In June, the chief U.S. negotiator on the issue, John Rood, flew to Lithuania to brief its government on the status of the U.S.-Polish negotiations. While U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Prague on July 8 to sign a missile-defense agreement with the Czechs, the U.S.-Polish talks remain stalemated. Although the U.S. State Department has declined to characterize Rood’s discussions in Vilnius as formal negotiations over a possible alternative site, the Pentagon acknowledged that the United States was considering other options should the talks with Poland remain deadlocked. 
Two factors have impeded consummation of a U.S.-Polish agreement. Polish officials want compensation in the form of U.S.-funded military modernization and other measures designed to ensure that Poland’s security does not suffer because of the deployments. Indeed, Russian officials have hinted at serious retaliation should Poland accept the interceptors. 
For the past few months, U.S. officials have offered proposals designed to assuage Russian security concerns about the planned ballistic missile defenses. The envisaged confidence-building measures aim to increase the transparency of operations at the base to the Russian government and to limit any theoretical threat the systems might pose to Russia’s own missile arsenal. 
At his April 2008 summit with President George W. Bush in Sochi, then-President Vladimir Putin praised what he uncharacteristically described as sincere U.S. efforts to meet Russia’s security concerns. Putin told the media that “certainly, in principle, adequate measures of confidence-building and transparency can be found.” 
Precise details concerning what Washington is offering remain unclear, but Russian and U.S. sources have revealed their basic content. Washington has proposed that Russian personnel could, with the host governments’ approval, conduct detailed inspections at the bases. In addition, U.S. officials have offered not to put the systems into operation until Iran demonstrates the capacity to attack Europe with ballistic missiles. Finally, U.S. officials have indicated they would accept limits on the scale of the missile-defense systems deployed in Russia’s vicinity in order to avoid the threat of overwhelming Russia’s own ballistic-missile arsenal. 
Translating these concepts into operational arms-control limits has proven challenging. For starters, Russia’s role in determining whether Iran is capable of threatening Europe with missile attacks, which would justify activating the missile interceptors in Poland, remains unclear. The two sides have differed for years about whether Iran presents a genuine threat to NATO’s security. 
Russian analysts have long accused the United States of exaggerating Iranian capabilities to justify stationing a missile-defense system in Europe that really aims to counter Russia’s own nuclear deterrent. U.S. officials insist that they will not give Russia the right to veto its missile-defense operations.
In addition, Putin and other officials are demanding that Russia receive a permanent presence at the missile-defense facilities to monitor their operations. Lavrov has publicly stated that Russia would insist on having a permanent military presence at the planned missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to monitor events at the facilities “second by second.” 
Czech and Polish leaders, recalling past periods of Russian and Soviet occupation, categorically reject hosting a permanent Russian presence. A day after the Sochi summit, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, warned that a “Russian presence in Poland is out of the question. Such a solution had been resorted to in the past and will not be repeated.” 
In the past, the Czech Republic and Poland also sought reciprocation from the Kremlin, but Russian officials have dismissed as “ridiculous” the idea of granting Czech or Polish representatives’ access to Russian defense sites, even for short-term inspections, and the Czechs and Poles appear to have dropped the idea. 
Even so, what steps Washington might take to overcome Russian fears about a missile-defense breakout also remains uncertain. For example, it is unclear where any limits might apply, how long they might last and whether they might restrict the joint missile-defense research and development programs the Pentagon is conducting with foreign allies such as Australia, Israel and Japan. 
Moreover, it is unclear how these measures would be enforced. The Bush administration shuns overly rigid arms agreements that could constrain U.S. flexibility in responding rapidly to emerging threats. In recent arms-control negotiations, however, Russian policymakers have rejected informal arrangements, insisting that the United States negotiate formal, legally binding treaties. Not unreasonably, Russian leaders worry that a future Czech, Polish, Lithuanian or U.S. government might simply decide to stop enforcing any informal understandings, confronting Russia with a fait accompli. 

Richard Weitz is a senior fellow and director of program management at the Hudson Institute. © Project Syndicate

TITLE: Igor Sechin: The Great Arctic Conqueror
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The vast oil deposits located in what the Kremlin believes to be an extension of Russia’s continental shelf in the Arctic will be distributed solely at the government’s discretion, without holding the usual auctions or tenders. In a meeting on Friday with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who oversees the energy sector, President Dmitry Medvedev explained the decision, saying, “This was done consciously to ensure rational use of this national wealth.” 
Is he saying that only the imperialists allocate the rights to develop oil deposits through competitive auctions, whereas the Kremlin lets Sechin decide who gets what? Is Sechin the sole guarantor of Russia’s “rational use of its national wealth”? 
Prior to this announcement, Russia had been trying for a year to prove that the Lomonosov ridge, on the bottom of the Arctic, is a logical extension of the Siberian plain. General Vladimir Shamanov even said in a June 24 interview in Krasnaya Zvezda, the country’s military newspaper, that the military is prepared to fight any country that disputes Russia’s rights to the continental shelf.
So we won’t hold a tender, but we are willing to go to war. Naval warships will repel the forces of any country that contests Sechin’s right to exploit the oil deposits on the continental shelf.
In January, when Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov told the then-prosecutor general to find out what was going on with country’s drilling activities in the Arctic, it was discovered that the country’s only functioning Arctic drilling rigs, the Murmansk and the Valentin Shashin, had been rented out to a Norwegian drilling company at one-fourth of the market price. What a great example of the country’s “rational use of its national wealth”!
Things are no better with the military. During Soviet times, the country’s nuclear submarines patrolled the Arctic region. Strategically, it was the most favorable location from which Moscow could launch a possible nuclear strike against the United States; a missile launch from the Arctic would have the shortest possible flight time to U.S. territory. 
Maintaining a military presence in the Arctic, however, requires a complex and very expensive infrastructure, including a sophisticated communications system that can function reliably despite severe magnetic interference, and the ability to accurately predict bad weather conditions. 
But the Soviet Union had all that. My colleague and specialist on the Russian military, Alexander Golts, once pointed out to me that, “If anybody thinks we were on [the Arctic island of] Spitsbergen solely to mine coal, they should take a look at the weather station and landing strip there.” But since it was impossible to rent out our Spitsbergen assets for one-fourth of their market value to maximize “the rational use of its national wealth,” the whole installation fell into disrepair. 
It is, therefore, unclear what military resources Shamanov will have at his disposal to defend Sechin’s claims to the rich Arctic natural resources.
The most interesting part of this story is that, although there might really be large oil and gas reserves under the Arctic, Russia, unfortunately, is unable to mine those deposits without the help of foreign expertise and equipment. We can’t even tap the huge Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea by ourselves. 
But it is hard to imagine Russia entering joint Arctic exploration and development projects with foreign companies when our leaders are constantly shaking our fists at them and sending the country’s nuclear submarines to patrol the Arctic waters. 
Or perhaps the Kremlin is planning to pour a couple of billion dollars into the creation of an exotic new Russian hybrid — half-nuclear sub and half-underwater drilling platform. Not a bad idea at all! And I have got a perfect name for this one-of-a-kind vessel — “The Igor Sechin.” On its side we could write: “For the optimal use of Russia’s natural resources.” 

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Pole position
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The decadent charm, surreal plot and expressionist score of Karol Szymanowski’s philosophical 1926 opera “Krol Roger” (King Roger) captivated the audience at the Mariinsky Theater on July 16 as the work enjoyed its Russian premiere.
The opening night saw Polish soloists  Andrzej Dobber (Roger) and Elzbieta Szmytka (Roger’s wife Roxana) joining the Mariinsky cast in this Mariusz Trelinski production with stage designs by Boris Kudlieka that originally premiered at the Wroclaw Opera House.
Set in Sicily in the 12th century, the opera was inspired by the composer’s travels across the Mediterranean and the East.
When he first traveled to Sicily at the age of 29, Szymanowski was enthralled by Mediterranean culture, a melting pot of religions, traditions and ethnicities. The opera explores interpenetration of Byzantine, Arabic, Greek and Western European cultural influences. Szymanowski’s lyrical, expressionist score bears influences of Scriabin and Richard Strauss while retaining its originality.
In the first act, subtitled “Byzantine,” Roger meets an enigmatic Shepherd — who reveals himself as an incarnation of the Greek god Dionysus in the last act of the piece  — at a Catholic service in Palermo. The archbishop uses all his influence to persuade the king to execute the shepherd but Roxana convinces her husband to grant the mysterious man an audience instead. 
The opera opens in a dark auditorium, with chairs, walls and ceiling wrapped in black, and very little light. There are no icons or other religious symbols in the interiors, and when the choir enters, dressed in red catholic vestments, their bright robes provide a striking contrast to the chilling blackness of the hall and serve to create a powerful and hypnotic religious atmosphere. 
The king, the queen and the other members of the congregation are dressed in dark formal clothes and hardly move around. The sudden appearance of the herdsman — barefoot, his hair and loose white garments a mess — sends a shock through the church.
The Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra overpowered the soloists in the production, excelling in the romantic lyrical passages and putting the singers in the shade. 
Dobber offered a deep, masculine and ascetic take on King Roger. 
Vocally adroit, the soloist portrayed his character’s profound transformation with poignant drama and in keeping with the philosophical bent and mystical flair of the opera.
Szmytka brought languid sensuality to her interpretation of Roxana, giving a magnificent performance, her lyrical soaring soprano demonstrating volume and passion, mesmerizing in the high and tender notes.
Kudlieka avoids the period approach: the church interiors are high-tech, the royal couple are dressed in modern fashionable clothes, while Roger’s palace in Act II has stylish low sofas and transparent folding screens.
Trelinski staged the opera as a philosophical parable that centers around the conflict between the king and the shepherd that in the end sees the spiritual rebirth of the ruler of Sicily.
Eroticism and enticement abound in the second “Oriental” act as the charming shepherd enters the palace and begins to seduce Roger with hedonistic temptations. The king is furious to see his wife responding to these alluring calls. 
The final “Greco-Roman” act confines Roger to a hospital bed — he leaves it in the end, triumphing over Dionysian temptations, overcoming his fears, depression and jealousy, and emerging a new person.
Trelinski is not new to Szymanowski’s operas. In 2000, Trelinski’s rendition of “Krol Roger” at the Teatr Wielki (Grand Theater) in Warsaw earned the director the respected Karol Szymanowski Prize which is awarded by the Karol Szymanowski Foundation.
“Krol Roger” is the Mariinsky’s second acquisition of a Trelinski-Kudlieka production. In March 2005, the Mariinsky reproduced their internationally acclaimed rendition of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” which emphasized the cultural gap between East and West and was originally staged by the Polish National Opera in 1999.
Born in Warsaw in 1961, Trelinski started out as a film director and gained international recognition for his work. He first tried his hand at opera with a contemporary chamber opera, Elzbieta Sikora’s “Wyrywacz Serc,” which translates into English as “The Usurper of Hearts,” based on the prose of Boris Vian, in 1995. 
“Krol Roger”  is the first production for the Mariinsky cast — well-rehearsed in the German, French, Italian, British and Czech repertoires — that is sung in Polish.
“I admire the musical tissue of this opera,” Gergiev said before the premiere on July 16. “I appreciate its closeness to the Russian school and especially Scriabin as well as its colorful orchestration and surreal flair. Undoubtedly, this rarely staged opera deserves a Renaissance and I’m glad that I can introduce audiences to such a beautiful work.”
The Mariinsky is taking the new production to the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival where the company will be making a return after an absence of 13 years. “Krol Roger” will be performed at the festival on August 25 and 27.
According to the festival’s new director Jonathan Mills, the Mariinsky looks set to become a regular at the world’s largest arts event.
“I will be inviting them over and over again,” the manager said.
In Edinburgh, as well as “Krol Roger,” the Mariinsky will present concert versions of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera “Semyon Kotko,” Sergei Rachmaninoff’s opera “Aleko” and Rodion Schedrin’s opera “The Enchanted Wanderer.”
A composer himself, Mills devotes special attention to contemporary music and is especially interested in the works of living composers — something that makes the manager very close to Gergiev, whose recent presentations to St. Petersburg audiences have included, in addition to Schedrin’s opera, Thomas Ades’s “Powder Her Face” and a series of symphonic pieces and concertos by Henri Dutilleux.
Mills, formerly head of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, first crossed paths with Gergiev back in 2000 when Mills visited St. Petersburg. An invitation to Melbourne for Gergiev and his troupe followed shortly after and the contact has since developed.
Speaking to reporters before the premiere of “Krol Roger” last week, Mills said that the title of “Krol Roger” had first been mentioned between himself and Gergiev on the Mariinsky’s visit to Melbourne — the work was discussed at an open air nature reserve where there were kangaroos jumping around.
“The theme of this year’s [Edinburgh] festival is Artists Without Borders, and my collaboration with Valery Gergiev has already broken down many borders,” Mills said.
The manager sees festivals as journeys that inspire the artists and the audiences with an interest in their place in the world and their role as human beings.
“This year’s festival invites you to embark upon an exciting and often confrontational journey along these cultural borders and beyond,” Mills said. “Artists from Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bosnia and Georgia are juxtaposed with work from Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine, Israel and Iran — all territories with particular challenges on their own borders. Music from Orthodox Christian traditions is heard alongside devotional masterpieces from Islam.”

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: First they forbid you to dress as you like, then they forbid you to say what you think and, finally, they forbid you to think altogether. 
But punks, goths and emo kids have proved they can get organized when their rights are endangered — at least in Krasnoyarsk, where a reported 200 representatives of various youth subcultures, some with their mouths taped with Scotch, went to a rally on Saturday to protest the State Duma’s attack on what certain deputies see as “dangerous teen trends.”
The deputies’ “concept for the spiritual and moral education of children” includes curfews and the banning of emo and goth fashions from schools. (See page v).
“The protest was not even caused by the statutes included in the proposed law, such as the banning of fashions in schools or whatever, but the wording — absolutely insolent and false — used by the people who created it,” said Krasnoyarsk musician Andrei Skovorodnikov, one of the rally’s organizers. 
Skovorodnikov, the frontman of punk band Paranoya and Angedoniya, spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone on Thursday.
“Emos, goths and the other subcultures that have never been destructive are accused of every possible sin, starting from being anti-social and finishing with equating them with the most aggressive youth gangs. They were almost called ‘extremist’,” he said. 
The attack by Russian lawmakers follows an attack by the police when young people were reported to have been beaten and arrested near Sokolniki metro, a hangout for punks, goths and emos, in Moscow in April. 
In the Soviet Union, the police stopped persecuting punks and hippies in the late 1980s as Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies advanced.
“We are simply returning to <i>sovok</i> [a derogatory term referring to the Soviet Union and its ways of handling things],” Skovorodnikov said.
“That’s what is usually called <i>sovok</i> — when real deeds are substituted by empty gestures. Instead of going to young people and finding out what is on their minds and what they want, finding out what these emos and goths are, these agile deputies start to dictate, indiscriminately, how one should live, how one should dress and so on.
“The government always want people to be a gray and obedient mass, rather than a group of personalities that stand out. Anything that stands out makes such people anxious. That’s why such a clampdown on subcultures is underway.”
In Krasnoyarsk, slogans on the protesters’ posters invoked the title of a song by late Siberian musician Yegor Letov dealing with totalitarianism (“Kill the State in Yourself”) and “Man, His Rights and Freedoms Shall Be the Supreme Value” (a line from the Russian Constitution).
In St. Petersburg in February, 73 young fans of Letov who gathered to mourn him were arrested for improbable minor offences.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: So bad it’s good?
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The multi-million dollar revamp of the Mikhailovsky Theater during the past year has included a cascade of new productions, eye-catching appointments to key artistic posts in both its opera and ballet companies, as well a spectacular facelift of its building on Ploshchad Iskusstv (Arts Square) in central St. Petersburg.
Now the ballet company of the theater has followed the well-worn path to the west for a summer tour of two of its productions — “Giselle,” being performed this weekend — and “Spartacus,” which was presented on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Thursday, after the notoriously harsh London critics weighed in, the Mikhailovsky  could be forgiven for wishing it had stayed at home. 

The Daily Telegraph
These days more than ever, if you’re a first-rate dancer and you’re Russian, you’ll probably set your sights on Mariinsky or the Bolshoi, or else hop on a plane towards the great companies of the West.
Which makes the position of St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky ballet (despite its distinguished age and rich history — the theatre was founded 175 years ago) an unenviable one, even though the company is now under the directorship of former Kirov firecracker Farukh Ruzimatov.
Hopes, then, were not high for the Mikhailovsky’s first visit to London, or for choreographer George Kovtun’s new reworking of Grigorovich’s 1968 Soviet warhorse, Spartacus, with which the troupe opened its stay at the Coliseum. The Bolshoi has so often staged the story spectacularly, essentially using it as a showcase for the virile athleticism of its male leads. But, without Grigorovich’s muscular steps and such 24-carat talent on stage, what would there be to enjoy about this well-worn tale of the famous rebel slave?
The answer is: a barrage of camp so brazen that (only partly deliberately, one heavily suspects) it’s one of the funniest things you’re likely to see on a major dance stage this year. From sets to costumes to performances, the entire production radiates a gold-plated, more-is-more, Caesar’s Palace razzmatazz, as well as a very Russian, unselfconscious melodrama. And once you realize that this is what you’re getting, resistance is oddly useless.
Valeria (Irina Perren) rubs herself against Spartacus (Denis Matvienko) like a hungry pussycat against a sofa-leg. Spartacus, for his part, frugs against his cage bars like Brigitte Bardot in those hilarious late-Sixties movies. The soldiers keep doing ridiculous little can-can-esque knee kicks to one side, and, rather than smelling of blood and dust, the arena fights have a flouncy ooh-I’ll-scratch-your-eyes-out flavor. It’s all a long way from Gladiator.
One of the chief flouncers is Matvienko. A rather skinny Spartacus, he has a certain feral energy to him and whipped up some decent fire with his celebratory tours at the end of Act 1. Yet his elevation was often disappointing, and his combination of leonine locks, silent-movie emoting and amusing wardrobe of little skirtlets (one in tiger print, no less) was endlessly entertaining, but perhaps not entirely in the way he would have liked.
As for the other leads, Perren was a so-so Valeria, Nikita Dolgushin a slightly lumbering and constantly grinning Pompeius, Anastasia Matvienko a sexy Sabina, her legs shooting easily up to six o’clock, though let down by poor feet. The corps did their stuff gamely if unevenly.
In general, Kovtun’s steps aren’t great. Beside the preposterous moves for the legions, the many solos and pas de deux may be jam-packed with superficially impressive groin-stretching leaps and high-kicks, and complex lifts too, but the latter in particular tend to add little in terms of character development or psychological impact and tend simply to look effortful.
One must lay some of the blame at the dancers’ door, though. Stick (say) Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo in the leads, and how different the effect might have been.
Great ballet this isn’t. But great fun? Certainly. What the Mikhailovsky will make of Giselle and its mixed bill later this week, of course, remains to be seen.

—Mark Monahan


The Evening Standard
Ballet fans faced a bleak summer without the usual visit from the Bolshoi or Kirov, and struggled to accept that the Mikhailovsky Ballet would be anything like a replacement. St. Petersburg’s second troupe, formerly known as the Maly, is not in the same league as Russia’s two biggies but at last night’s opening performance it proved an unexpected and spectacular alternative.
For its UK premiere the company, now directed by Farukh Ruzimatov whom you may remember from his Kirov days (he was a regular on its London visits), danced a new production of Spartacus. To call this ballet lurid, gaudy and flamboyant doesn’t begin to convey its over-the-top hilarity. It’s like Shirley Bassey, The Battle of Britain and Carry on Caligula rolled into one, with cartoon baddies, Bacchanites, and what look suspiciously like mullet hair-dos.
It obviously bears only passing resemblance to the story of the Spartan slave revolt, and people of taste will rightly tear their hair at its vulgarity, bombast and melodrama. It is, truly, beyond bonkers.
But who cares? It is one of the best worst things I’ve seen for years, and you will laugh out loud at its flashy, trashy good fun. Khachaturian’s music is pure Vegas, the singers move lumpenly, and the acting - let’s just say it makes Sid James look like a man of restraint. There have even been rumors of live tigers at its recent Russian premier, a story so good you don’t want to check and find it’s untrue. Add to that the kipper feet in the corps de ballet, and you probably think I’ve lost my head.
Saving it all are the leading four dancers, who are both committed and sensational. How Marat Shemiunov (Crassus) can wear a loincloth and a straight face I do not know, while Spartacus (Denis Matvienko) manages to dance in a tasseled codpiece. Both are cracking movers and the duets with their respective leading ladies, Sabina (Anastasia Matvienko) and Valeria (Irina Perren), will have you wide-eyed.
The choreography is by George Kovtun, a Russian you won’t have heard of, and the clever flexi sets, albeit improbable props, are by Vyacheslav Okunev, another Russian you probably won’t know. The whole shebang cost a bone-crunching $3.5million, and many will think it wasteful hoke. I, however, think it’s worth every sidesplitting penny.

— Sarah Frater
The Times
The Mikhailovsky Theatre (formerly the Maly) is St Petersburg’s other great ballet and opera institution, with roots going back to 1833 and a history of artists that includes Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Balanchine. These days it enjoys the patronage of the Russian businessman Vladimir Kekhman, who not only paid to renovate the theatre (more than ?12 million) but also to produce its splashy new Spartacus.
Actually, to call this epic gladiator ballet splashy is to sell it well short. It’s overwhelming. With a price tag of ?1.8 million and a cast of 200 (150 dancers and a 50-strong chorus), this is Spartacus as a massive Bollywood extravaganza. George Kovtun, who choreographed it, has clearly been influenced by Yuri Grigorovich’s beefy Soviet staging (for years the Bolshoi’s calling card abroad), but Kovtun’s clamorous remake offers even more blunt force trauma. His favorite motif is testosterone on the move (gladiators and centurions, swords and shields flying); his favorite vocabulary is brazenly acrobatic (the lifts are scary!) and low on inspiration – vulgarity meets Viagra.
As for the storytelling, it’s wildly unbalanced, with too much attention paid to Crassus, our villain, and not enough to Spartacus, our hero. And the plot is more or less abandoned in a dreary and overlong second act that seems to think it’s a series of lurid divertissements rather than a dramatic ballet. But Act I is an astonishing theatrical steamroller, its finale of rebellious slaves crashing into the interval like a herd of marauding rugby players. The sets are dark and looming, the tacky costumes evocative of a bad Ancient Roman costume party. The Mikhailovsky’s 80-strong orchestra, under Karen Durgarian’s zealous conducting, plays Khachaturian with staggering loudness.
Denis Matvienko is terrific as Spartacus, a fearless freedom fighter with a true heart and a bold heroic sweep to his dancing that energizes the entire evening and makes sense of the nonsense. As Crassus, Marat Shemiunov exudes patrician vanity, though his acting is hopelessly melodramatic. Irina Perren is given short shrift as Spartacus’s beloved Valeria but still shines tenderly. And Anastasia Matvienko has the most fun as Crassus’s courtesan girlfriend, shooting her legs into the air in a fabulous display of hussy extensions. The production may display more money than sense, but if it’s spectacle you want it can’t be beat.

— Debra Craine

TITLE: Word’s
         worth
TEXT: English-speaking readers of Kommersant might have been disconcerted to learn that the new U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation is a bird. In fact, he’s two birds. According to a guest at the Spasso House’s Independence Day bash, he appeared “such duck of a fellow, but he is the hawk harsher than William Burns.” 
Such duck? The hawk? Get the translator hook! Sentence the English-language editor to three whacks with the American Heritage Dictionary! And get the newspaper’s legal counsel on the cell phone. It’s retraction time.
It turns out that Ambassador John Beyrle is not a duck at all. In Russian, the quoted opinion of the guest reads: <i>Ýòî îí ñ âèäó òàêîé äóøêà, à íà ñàìîì äåëå ÿñòðåá ïîêðó÷å Óèëüÿìà Á¸ðíñà</i> (It only seems like he’s a sweetheart. In reality, he’s much more of a hawk than [former U.S. Ambassador] William Burns). 
<i>Äóøêà</i> (from <i>äóøà</i>, or soul) is a lovely word to describe a kind and congenial person. The translator must have been thinking of the British “duck” (or “ducks,” “duckie”) used as an affectionate direct form of address. Too bad the translator didn’t consult a more reliable source on usage. 
But all this got me thinking about ducks. <i>Óòêà</i> (duck) can mean a quacking, waddling water bird or the elongated bedpan used by male patients. It is also slang for a false report in the press. Here both English and Russian borrowed from the French, who presumably were the first Europeans to come up with this devilish form of slanderous misinformation. Russian borrowed it as a calque (a loan translation), whereas English stole the practice and the word: canard. <i>Èçâåñòèå îêàçàëîñü óòêîé</i> (The news turned out to be a canard).
Russians also appropriated the phrase <i>õðîìàÿ óòêà</i> (lame duck), from the original English usage to mean a person who has defaulted on his or her debts or has gone bankrupt. In Russian it is defined differently: <i>êîìïàíèÿ â òÿæ¸ëîì ôèíàíñîâîì ïîëîæåíèè, èñïðàâèòü êîòîðîå ìîæåò ñàíàöèÿ è ãîñóäàðñòâåííàÿ ïîääåðæêà</i> (a company in dire financial straits which can only be fixed by reorganization and state support). 
It doesn’t seem that Russian has appropriated the term lame duck in the political sense. Before assuming office, Dmitry Medvedev was officially called <i>âíîâü èçáðàííûé è íå âñòóïèâøèé â äîëæíîñòü ïðåçèäåíòà</i> (literally, the newly-elected-but not-yet-in-office president). What a mouthful. Laconic English just calls this person “the president-elect.”
Russians have also borrowed the American political distinction between hawks (<i>ÿñòðåáû</i>) and doves (<i>ãîëóáè</i>) that appeared in the early 1960s. But judging by the media, these words today also have a special Russian meaning. As far as I can tell, <i>ÿñòðåá</i> is a politician we don’t get along with and whom we want to call a war-mongerer for domestic political reasons. <i>Ãîëóáü</i> is a politician who opposes the hawk, but who may be just as bad.

<i>Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.</i>

TITLE: China crisis
AUTHOR: By Charles K. Armstrong
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “We now know” the truth about the Cold War, declared historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University in his 1997 book of that title. In fact, there is still a great deal we do not know, and much work remains to be done on many specific incidents and aspects of Cold War history. Lorenz M. Luthi, one of Gaddis’ former students at Yale and currently an assistant professor of international history at McGill University in Montreal, has written an exhaustive and important study of one of the most critical events of that history, the so-called Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In February 1950, China and the Soviet Union signed a “Friendship Treaty” that seemed to signal a long-term and (for the West) ominous alliance. Ten years later, that alliance was in tatters, and by the end of the 1960s the two sides were shooting at each other across parts of their long border. Despite the importance of the Sino-Soviet conflict, little about it could be assessed by primary research because of the closed nature of both societies — until now.
Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, scholarly access to the archives of former communist states continues to transform our understanding of the Cold War. Yet few Western scholars have had the training and the patience to do the sort of multilingual, multinational, multiarchival work necessary for solid research in this area. Luthi not only has done thorough research in the Russian- and Chinese-language documents, but also has explored the archives in German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Italian and French. The result is an astonishingly well-documented, densely detailed history of the causes and development of the Sino-Soviet conflict from virtually every relevant perspective.
Of course, the Sino-Soviet split was a major concern of Western scholars at the time (although many were slow to recognize its emergence under the facade of socialist “friendship”), and Luthi has to deal with the contemporary political science literature on the subject, as well as the history of the rupture itself. He does so deftly and succinctly in the book’s introduction, in which he criticizes some of the Cold War-era explanations for the split, which focused on competing national interests, the Sino-U.S.-Soviet strategic triangle and the primacy of domestic politics. For his part, Luthi emphasizes ideology as the key motivating factor in the Sino-Soviet conflict — that is, differences between Moscow and Beijing over the “correct” interpretation and practice of communism. Each side accused the other of apostasy from true communism: For the Soviet Union, China was dangerously “leftist” and “adventurist”; for China, the Soviet Union was too conservative, or “revisionist,” both internally and in its dealings with U.S. imperialism.
However, it is often difficult to separate “pure” ideology (whatever that may mean) from other motivations. Luthi says at several points that ideology “had both instrumental and genuine characteristics,” but it is not always clear what is instrumental and what is genuine. Sino-Soviet relations were best when the Soviet Union was ruled by Josef Stalin, arguably the most cynical leader in Soviet history, but one can dispute whether this was because ideology was downplayed or because China was relatively weak and dependent at the time. Nikita Khrushchev, who saw himself as a more genuine communist than Stalin, later managed to alienate not only Mao Zedong but also many other communist leaders. Perhaps communists get along best when ideology is merely instrumental. Narrowly focused on the late 1950s and 1960s, Luthi doesn’t much explore the implications of his interpretation for Sino-Soviet relations in earlier and later periods.
Luthi attributes the Sino-Soviet split to three main points of conflict between the two countries: the communist economic model, de-Stalinization and policy toward the West. It may be going too far to say, as Luthi suggests, that these three conflicts were primarily ideological. All had a great deal to do with domestic politics, strategic interests and each country’s respective position as a leader of world communism. But certainly these conflicts were expressed in ideological terms, and one thing post-Cold War scholarship has confirmed is that in many cases — especially in Third World communist states and movements, such as in China and Cuba — ideology was a more genuine motivation than many cynical Western observers realized at the time. The Chinese side was far more active than the Soviet one in pursuing ideological conflict, and questioned Moscow’s communist bona fides at every turn, from the dispute over Taiwan, to detente with the West, to modernizing the economy. There is no doubt that the leaders of the People’s Republic of China wished to prove their country to be a more genuine communist state than their erstwhile benefactor, the Soviet Union. The result, for China, was famine, international isolation and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.
Neither the Soviet Union nor China fares well in Luthi’s analysis, but China looks worse. Throughout the book, there is a recurrent dynamic of Chinese provocations and Soviet blunders. Much of this can be traced to the personalities of Mao and Khrushchev, which might be reduced to impulsiveness and arrogance, respectively. Indeed, Mao appears extraordinarily foolhardy — at times almost out of touch with reality. His quixotic domestic policies and self-isolating attacks on virtually all “fraternal” states and parties, not to mention his provocative actions against the United States, may have given Mao the ideological upper hand but were disastrous for his country. Khrushchev, more cautious and accommodating to both his enemies and his allies, ended up fighting a Cold War against both China and the United States, and Khrushchev’s successors found themselves facing a quasi-alliance between the United States and China. The three-way balance between these countries may not have mattered much to the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s, but the United States took it seriously enough to align itself with the much more radical of the two communist giants in the 1970s. Thus, the strategic triangle was a result, not a cause, of the Sino-Soviet split.
The bulk of “The Sino-Soviet Split” is a richly detailed, mostly chronological story of the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations from fraternal alliance to the brink of armed conflict, ending with the collapse of their military alliance during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam case, however, suggests that China and the Soviet Union were not always in conflict in their foreign relations, even when mutual recrimination was at its peak. After all, Moscow and Beijing both continued to give military aid to North Vietnam throughout its war with South Vietnam and the Americans. Common interests could at times trump ideological differences.
Sometimes Luthi appears too uncritical of sources, especially secondary sources, such as Li Zhisui’s controversial “The Private Life of Chairman Mao.” Unsupported by other types of evidence, secondhand memoirs such as Li’s can cross the line into gossip. But on the whole, Luthi’s use of multiple, cross-referenced sources is exemplary, if still limited by uneven access. Whereas access to Soviet sources, and even more to those of former communist states in Eastern Europe, is quite extensive, access to Chinese sources remains selective and limited. Unlike Russia, China still has a ruling Communist Party that can vet documents available to scholars, especially foreign scholars. Paradoxically, this may partly explain why China looks worse in Luthi’s account, as he has to fill in the document gap on the Chinese side with anecdotes, memoirs and third-party accounts. 
“The Sino-Soviet Split” is a major achievement in Cold War history and the standard against which future scholarship on this subject likely will be judged for many years to come. Nevertheless, to suggest that any study is the “final word” on any topic is profoundly ahistorical. As Mao himself allegedly said, when asked about his evaluation of the historical impact of the French Revolution: It’s too early to tell.

Charles K. Armstrong is an associate professor of history at Columbia University and the author of “The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950.” He is currently writing a book on North Korean foreign policy in the Cold War era.

TITLE: Emo breakdown
AUTHOR: By Yelena Shuster
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In a basement studio in northern Moscow, singer Valentin Ayedonitsky screeches about his broken heart, his asymmetrical bangs flapping with every beat.
“Things have become so lonely, nothing interests me anymore / Daylight, but light is lacking, around there is only dark night.”
Dressed in tight jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and skull-adorned Vans, Ayedonitsky, 22, looks more Brooklyn than Moscow. But he and his band, MAIO, are part of the country’s burgeoning emo scene — a subculture coming under increasing government scrutiny. 
Teens sporting emo couture — black bangs, eyebrow piercings, pinned shoulder bags — have become a ubiquitous sight in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. In St. Petersburg they like to hang around the bars on Konyushennaya Ploshchad — particularly Mod.
But State Duma deputies, Public Chamber members and social conservatives have hammered out legislation aimed at heading off the spread of emo culture, which they describe as a “dangerous teen trend.”
The Duma last month held a parliamentary hearing on a raft of proposed amendments contained in a document called “Government Strategy in the Sphere of Spiritual and Ethical Education,” a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times. 
Among other measures, the proposed legislation calls for heavy regulation of emo web sites and for banning young people dressed like emos from entering schools and government buildings.
Sitting at a table with scattered cans of Red Bull and packs of Marlboro Lights, MAIO drummer Dmitry Gilevich, 21, was indignant over the bill.
“Expressing psychological emotions is not forbidden by law,” Gilevich said. “I believe every individual has that right.”
At the heart of the emo backlash is widespread ignorance of the subculture, Gilevich said. 
“People think it’s an aggressive subculture for youth who cut their veins every day,” he said. “First and foremost, emo is not a culture of the soul, but of music.”
MAIO bassist Alexander Kulikov, 22, said emo music has a therapeutic effect on teens. He discovered the emo band Aiden when he was 17 years old and credits their lyrics for helping him persevere.
“Those bands really helped me survive my difficult, neurotic age,” Kulikov said.
Ayedonitsky loves the energy of the music. “It’s not just that you like it and want to listen to it. It gives you goose bumps. You want to scream, to run,” he said.
“You want to push the pedal, get up and dance in the traffic jams,” added guitarist Dmitry Sergeyenko, 23.
Like many youth trends in Russia, emo culture is a Western import. Born out of 1980s “emotional hard-core” rock in Washington D.C. (and undergoing a rebirth in 2000), emo culture arrived in Moscow in 2003 after droves of young Russians began downloading foreign music on the Internet.
Hard-core rock about love infiltrated the independent music scene as bands like The Used and Finch were on heavy rotation at Funkysouls.com. 
“These groups showed up in our country years after they were popular in the United States, and teens caught this wave,” said Pavel Shumilov, 21, co-founder of the web site Emokids.ru. “Since then, the emo underground music scene has faded into a mainstream style.”
Created in 2005, Emokids.ru has 6,000 registered members in its forum and gets more than 500 original hits per day, Shumilov said.
With Keds borrowed from the skaters, piercings from punks and a love of all things black from goths, emo style in Russia has become at once indefinable and everywhere.
The lawmakers who drafted the proposed legislation, however, have spelled out their own definition. 
Emos, according to the bill, are from 12 to 16 years old and wear black and pink clothing. They have black hair with long bangs that “cover half the face,” black fingernails, black belts peppered with studs and pins, and ear and eyebrow piercings, the bill says.
The “negative ideology” of emo culture may push young people toward depression and social withdrawal, and the movement carries a significant risk of suicide, especially for young girls, according to the bill.
Dasha Larionova, 21, who listens to MAIO and My Chemical Romance and has an affection for emo fashion, believes that the association between emo culture and suicide is just a stereotype. 
“There are way too many emo teens to have one general characteristic,” Larionova said. “The government doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
The bill also outlines what it calls a “spiritual and ethical crisis” facing Russian youth, including the high rate of alcohol abuse, teen abortions and “negative youth movements.”
Emo ideology encourages and justifies drug use and sexual relations among minors, according to the bill, which also lumps emos and goths together with skinheads.
“The point of the bill is so that by 2020, Moscow will have someone to rule its government,” said Alexander Grishunin, an adviser to Public Chamber member Yevgeny Yuryev, one of the bill’s three coordinators. “This is the first step in the public discourse.”
The bill’s sponsors hope that it will be passed into law by the end of the year.
This is not the first time emo kids have been targeted as a danger to society. 
In November, the Novgorod regional education department issued a letter to all schools in the region with a description of emo culture, saying the “dream of every [emo] is to die in a warm bath from the blood of cutting their wrists.”
The branch distributed the letter at the behest of the regional branch of the Federal Security Service, according to the bill’s footnotes.
One school in Chelyabinsk has banned emo attire, saying it violates the Constitution because it promotes “violence,” the news agency Novy Region reported.
Igor Ponkin, one of the bill’s authors and a member of the Interior Ministry’s public oversight council, described emo culture as a “social danger” that demands measures such as dress codes in schools, Internet regulation and state-sponsored after-school activities.
Ponkin said emo kids exchange photographs showing off their slashed wrists. “This type of behavior is a crucial part of emo ideology,” he said.
“Of course there are emo teens who just listen to their music. But our actions are not directed at them but rather at those who also hurt themselves, commit suicide and promote those acts,” Ponkin added.
Not all psychologists agree with Ponkin’s analysis, however.
“Suicide is not a symptom of emo culture. I work with other teens too, and every group has emotionally troubled kids,” said psychologist Inna Cherkova, who has worked with local teenagers, including emo kids, for 15 years.
Many subcultures can, in fact, help children mature into adults, psychologist Alyona Filippova said.
“Many kids seek those with the same perspective and problems and, through this, they can enter general society,” Filippova said. 
She said, however, that those who cling to subcultures do have a higher risk of psychological problems. 
But the emo movement may fade into obscurity before the proposed bill ever becomes law. The anti-emo backlash is almost as prevalent as the culture itself.
Many bands who were formally identified as emo are quick to distance themselves from their “earlier” emo period. 
Sergei Vel, the lead vocalist in rock band Radio Cambodia, which is heavily featured on Emokids.ru, says he no longer listens to emo music.
“Even those who play emo music will not admit that it’s emo, because it’s not in style anymore,” Vel said. “It used to be honest and real. Now it all faded and merged into the mainstream. I can identify with emo culture, but not the kind that is now being offered in Russia.”
Andrei Shmorgun, 28, said he loves the emotional quality of emo music, but that in Russia, “this style is not accepted as it should be.”
“They ruined the stereotype of emo and turned it into some kind of suicidal trend,” said Shmorgun, a member of the metal band Arda.
Kulikov, the bassist for MAIO, said it was natural that emo culture is spawning enemies.
“The more popular the wave, the more antagonists will rise — in any music,” Kulikov said. “If someone is saying something negative, he probably has no idea what we or our music are about.”

TITLE: Spiritual images
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doktorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: For anyone interested in the Putin-era resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, an exhibition at the Rumyantsev Mansion branch of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg offers a visual guide to the phenomenon. The show has proved so popular that its run has been extended until the end of August.
The organizers have selected 200 photographs from the archives of Foma magazine (“St. Thomas”), a major national Orthodox publication for lay people. 
The magazine was founded in 1996 and calls itself a “publication intended for doubters” like the biblical Doubting Thomas of its title. It supports public discussion of religious and philosophical questions. A recent issue featured authors and correspondents from different walks of life, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist Serge Shmemann, Moscow filmmakers Ivan Popov and Nikita Mikhalkov, actor Yevgeny Mironov and Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railways. 
Over the years, this Moscow-based magazine with a few regional offices (including St. Petersburg) has published a vast amount of photographic material accompanying its articles and interviews and independent series of photographic art. 
For this exhibition, the selection committee chose works dealing with the spiritual, monastic and church life of Russians living in the north western part of the country. These record both the daily services and special festive ceremonies. They show us worshippers of all ages. They convey the inner meaning of life in religious establishments. Many deal with the process of restoring houses of worship and the construction of new monasteries. Frequently they include beautiful landscapes of Russian provinces as a backdrop.
Among the talented contributors whose photos appeared in the magazine is Yevgeny Kashirin from Ryazan. He is not only a photographer, but also a historian and a chronicler of his town. Each of his photographs is a story in itself and a series of them becomes a saga. 
Another famous photographer whose works are displayed in this show is Andrei Chizov from St. Petersburg. He has created his own artistic space and has a deep philosophical dimension, playing with space and time, using montages, superimposition and special papers to achieve his effects. At the exhibition he presents the series “Putting on Robes” showing a village priest getting ready for a service. The pictures illustrate provincial Russia, with its small towns and villages, and depict daily life such as the installation of a new church bell, baptism in a brook or baking bread at a monastery.
One of the photographers, who participates in an annual cross-carrying procession in a Moscow region town, records the event with his camera each year. Physically, such religious events can be difficult. Processions can last a long time and can take place in inaccessible places, such as newly constructed monasteries or old and restored ones like that on Valaam Island: beautiful photos by Ludmila Chezina of worshippers there form part of the exhibition.
Deep spiritual involvement can also change a photographer’s life — photographer Igor Palkin started out working for Moscow-based newspaper St. Tatiana’s Day but gradually became so involved in religious life that he was eventually ordained as a priest. 
The photographs in the display vary from small to big and very big: as much as two square meters, in the case of “Biblical Scenes” by Vladimir Klavicho-Telepnev.
The organizers are looking forward to presenting further exhibitions and have announced a competition for contributors to a show entitled “Territory of Joy II,” which is planned for October/November in St. Petersburg, after which it will travel around the Russian regions and abroad.    

“Territory of Joy,” Rumyantsev Mansion, 44 Angliiskaya Naberezhnaya through August. Entrance from 45 Galernaya Ulitsa.

TITLE: Big in Japan
AUTHOR: By Ellie Bastian
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Miso // 15 Suvorovsky Prospekt  // Tel: 271 5967 // Open daily from 11am to 11pm // Menu in Russian // Lunch for two without alcohol 1,750 rubles ($75)
Queries about high quality sushi restaurants in St. Petersburg yield few results and can force the deprived sushi fanatic to resort to yet more blini and borshch. But, standing unobtrusively on the corner of Suvorovsky Prospekt and 7th Sovetskaya Ulitsa, about 8,000 kilometers from the nearest pagoda and sumo stable, one can find the small Japanese restaurant Miso.
Even a madman would be momentarily at ease upon entering Miso. Tastefully bare tan walls and a reflective black ceiling are paired with calming, rhythmic nature music, and large windows allow for natural light to trump artificial sources. Small clusters of stones, candles and elongated vases inhabit the window-sills. The only wall decoration — a small plasma television — produces images of various sea creatures (some of which will soon be in your stomach) and almost induces a trance-like state as the jellyfish undulate in time with the music.
The traditional miso soup from which the restaurant takes its name (90 rubles, $3.90) was a bit on the brothy side, and jumpstarting the main course with some California rolls (200 rubles, $8.60) or vegetable tempura (220 rubles, $9.50) might be more satisfactory.
Regardless of your appetizer choice, rest assured that your hands will be clean — the server delivers small, piping-hot towels shortly before returning with food.   
Miso’s large variety of sushi may be problematic for the indecisive, but their combination plates are a fine solution. The oonagi set (500 rubles, $21.50) runs the flavor gamut from mild to fishy to fiery between its 8 oonagi rolls, 2 oonagi sushi and 2 spicy oonagi sushi. After finishing it I found myself scraping together every stray piece of rice to eek out one final bite. For those less keen on sushi try the oodon noodles with 3 types of fish (350 rubles, $15.00). Its slippery noodles make it tricky to eat with chopsticks, and your ego may shrink as you opt for a fork. And don’t be shocked when the portion looks a bit smaller in your black triangular bowl than it appeared in the photo on the menu.
A thick wooden door conceals the bathroom, which can be enjoyed by anyone physically able to trot up the two steps to get there. This shouldn’t be an obstacle since customers inside already conquered the two wheelchair-unfriendly main entryway stairs. The atmosphere morphs into a more ominous Zen vibe in the same-sex restroom as dark slate walls and sounds of thunderstorms greet your arrival. Although the toilet is first-class by Russian standards, it pales in comparison with authentic Japanese toilets. Those who fantasize about multiple bidets, seat-warmers, or other fancy Japanese toilet gadgets will be disappointed. 
Numerous beverage choices dot the menu, including various teas, coffees, sodas, and juices. The Banana Milkshake — though not a massive bargain at 130 rubles ($5.60) — is still nonetheless revitalizing on a balmy summer day. The restaurant’s great shame is buried in the alcohol menu. Among Miso’s plentiful and reasonably priced alcohol choices, sake is embarrassingly lacking. Sake, or nihonshu in Japanese, is the popular alcoholic drink of fermented rice. Sake and Japan are as intimately wed as vodka and Russia.   
In order to elongate your stay, there are several tempting dessert concoctions, imaginatively adding a Japanese twist to more common favorites. The fruit in tempura (290 rubles, $12.50) provides a mound of warm apple chunks, individually nestled in small tempura cocoons. Accompanied by vanilla ice cream and a strawberry sauce, the dish is a pleasant finale to the meal.
For those lacking the time to dine in, orders can be made over the telephone and picked up in the restaurant. 
Miso also isn’t what you’d find in on a street corner in Tokyo. But it fulfills the need for a quality, relaxing sushi option in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Hip Hop Dance
AUTHOR: By Cori Weiner
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In terms of quantity, hip hop dance is without question a growing phenomenon here in St. Petersburg, with countless dance schools having multiplied throughout the city over the past five years or so. In terms of quality, however, there leaves much to be desired. 
Apart from not growing up in a hip hop community, as many dancers do in the U.S., two main obstacles prevent Russian dancers from performing to the highest standards. The first is in the general mindset — achieving one’s own style is not the prevalent goal here. In a beginner’s hip hop class in the U.S., the dancer may be introduced to the concept of adding his or her own style but in Russia, by contrast, it’s all about copying others’ moves as accurately as possible, including styles. This methodology seems to go against the very roots of hip hop, which stress creativity and freestyle dance.
That’s not to say that Russians with talent and drive aren’t striving to make their mark. There are even two main institutions responsible for putting Russia on the international hip hop map: Hip Hop International and Modern Dance Institute. Both organizations invite dancers year round to give master classes with the goal of later sending Russian dancers to attend events where they are granted the opportunity to compete worldwide. 
Based in Los Angeles, Hip Hop International (www.hhi-russia.ru), provides the connections needed to invite stars such as creator of the “locking” style Don Campbell and his son Dennis Danehy. 
On June 1, “Stomp the Yard” choreographer Chuck Maldonado came to St. Petersburg to give classes, and on at the end of this month champions from a Russia-wide competition held earlier this year are due to fly to Las Vegas to compete in the 2008 World Hip Hop Dance Championship.
Modern Dance Institute (www.mdispb.com) has similar goals: raising the bar for professional dancers in Russia and providing master classes to prepare them for the yearly Juste Debout competition in France. 
Selected representatives from the previous year’s competition run the master classes. Styles range from popping and locking to house and new style, all official categories of the competition itself, and classes are held twice a month. In 2009 the pre-selection for Juste Debout will be held in Russia.
Aside from these large organizations, pursuing lessons can be quite challenging simply because it is virtually impossible to predict the quality of instruction based on the price of the lessons, location of the dance school, or the conditions of the studio for the various hip hop dance classes on offer in St. Petersburg. 
One choice is to consult the succinct and informative website www.idance.ru/school_list.php. Type in your location and dance interests, and then see how viewers have rated schools. 
According to Maria Bydolak of Hip Hop International, the better schools tend to be more underground, which means they are even harder for the average visitor to St. Petersburg to find. 
Some of those that she mentions are United Dance, Canon Dance, Right Dance and Chicago. 
Alena Popova of Modern Dance Institute provides quite a different list consisting of the larger schools with financial stability: Studio 17, MadStyle, Dance Impress, and FunFanatiks. These are the schools that competed in the hip hop “battle” (contest) PM: STATION in 2006. 
Just be sure when you investigate not to be put off by the names of the classes. R n B, New Style, Street Dance, and sometimes even Club can all be code for different styles of hip hop. Many studios offer the first class for free. A rather glaring exception is Gerbera, not offering the first class for free, and only holding classes for 40-45 min. 
In the end, in addition to classes, competitions, and organizations, “what is absolutely necessary for Russia is the continued effort of the cultural exchange of ideas,” says Dennis Danehy. “Without it, the level will never rise, the hip hop culture will become too commercialized and watered down, and Russia will continue to trail the rest of the world.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It starts innocently enough. You’re at a party and someone gets out a guitar. Two hours later, you’ve heard the entire repertoire of Zolotoye Koltso and Alexander Rozenbaum, the soundtrack of “Irony of Fate,” and numerous songs about how the train conductor isn’t in a hurry, there are only nine men to every 10 girls and the coach driver can hold his horses. And everybody is absolutely word perfect, while you’re racking your brains for the words of “Yesterday.” 
It’s an amazing skill, and Channel One must have had plenty of applicants for its latest game show, “Sing If You Can,” which searches for the owner of the largest memory bank of song lyrics.
The show is based on an American original format called “Singing Bee,” although I’m sure the songs featured there are very different. The presenter, Dmitry Shepelyov, pulls six contestants out of the audience and narrows them down to one with the help of fiendishly difficult quizzes, where they have to put song lyrics in the right order and complete lines from songs correctly. 
Then the finalist has to do a solo performance by filling in the blanks in seven songs. 
He or she can only make two mistakes. The prize after all that is a car. On the first show, it was hard to tell whether it was a Lada or a Maybach, since it was covered with balloons and had arpeggios of silver notes over the front grille.
The participants were so enthusiastic, literally running on to the stage and dancing along to the songs, that I suspected the involvement of actors. But 7 Dnei magazine reassured me with an article that said the channel auditioned 500 people. The best part of the show was the house band, which played its corny repertoire of Avraam Russo and “White Roses” absolutely straight and wore its satin shirts with pride.
No one won the main prize on Saturday. Finalist Lyubov threw herself onto the stage weeping after she blew it by mixing up “your” and “my” in the last song. 
It was a horrible moment, especially as she had been performing — not just mouthing — every song and had dressed up in an outfit involving a lot of chiffon. 
Shepelyov told her sweetly that “the car isn’t worth one of your tears,” but she didn’t look at all happy about the consolation prize of a karaoke machine.
Rather frighteningly, I recognized most of the songs and might even have completed the line about “wishing you the longest night out of a thousand nights” if the spoilsport makers hadn’t put the answers up on screen straight away. The emphasis was on late Soviet-era slow songs and a scattering of recent pop. And I bet the Americans don’t have a song called, “My Love Lives on the 25th Floor.” 
This week, Channel One also started a season called “Night Dudes,” which shows the American version of “The Office,” David Duchovny in “Californication” and William Baldwin in “Dirty Sexy Money,” among other things. They’ve done the dubbing properly and in general it is a classy program. 
The only problem: All the shows start at 11:20 p.m., as the channel is convinced a mass audience wouldn’t want to see these shows. Even though “Lost” has already been a huge hit on Channel One.
The preview session before each show is co-hosted by Katya Gordon, a presenter on Mayak radio station. She has now been suspended from her radio job after an on-air altercation with It Girl Ksenia Sobchak. I don’t know if the scandal was a factor, but she has finally got a chance to shine on national television.

TITLE: Federer Out of Rogers After 2nd Round
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TORONTO — Top-ranked Roger Federer was knocked out of the Rogers Cup with a 2-6, 7-5, 6-4 loss to France’s Gilles Simon in a second-round match Wednesday night.
Federer, who won the tournament in 2004 and ‘06, was playing his first match since losing the Wimbeldon final in five sets to Spain’s Rafael Nadal.
“That’s just unbelievable for me to win against him,” Simon said.
Federer, who became the first top seed to lose in his first match here since Lleyton Hewitt in 2002, finished second here last year to Serbia’s Novak Djokovic.
“The problem was my game today,” Federer said.
It was the biggest surprise of a soggy day at the tournament that saw play disrupted for nearly six hours by thundershowers.
Second-seeded Rafael Nadal looks like the favorite now, though he didn’t look stellar in his first match Wednesday, struggling early on before ousting Ottawa-born qualifier Jesse Levine 6-4, 6-2.
There were several other notable upsets on the day. Croatian Marin Cilic ousted 12th-seeded Spaniard Tommy Robredo 6-3, 6-4; Sweden’s Robin Soderling defeated 13th seed Fernando Verdasco of Spain 6-4, 6-7 (4), 6-4; Argentina’s Jose Acasuso beat 14th-seeded Fernando Gonzalez of Chile 6-3, 3-6, 6-3; and Russian Igor Andreev got past 16th-seeded Czech Tomas Berdych 6-4, 3-6, 6-4.
Of course, nothing compares to eliminating Federer.
“For sure, this is my best victory,” said Simon, ranked 22nd in the world. “I don’t think that you win so many times against the No. 1 in the world. It happens maybe in the career of a player maybe two, three times if you are lucky.”
The match started off smoothly for Federer until Simon broke his serve to go up 4-2 in the second set. Federer returned the favor and held serve to draw to 4-4 and then 5-5, but Simon held serve in the 11th game and broke Federer in the 12th to take the set.
“As the match went on I struggled a little bit to put the forehands away,” Federer said. “He’s a good baseliner. We saw that today. He moves well. He’s deceiving because he’s kind of thin and tall but moves really well for his height, you know. He flicks a lot of balls with his backhand as well, so when you come in you can’t see where he plays.”
Suddenly, Federer’s side of the bracket looks wide open.
Fourth-seeded Nikolay Davydenko is the highest seed remaining there. He defeated Germany’s Tommy Haas 6-3, 7-6 (6) on Wednesday. Seventh-seeded James Blake was also a winner, beating Sweden’s Jonas Bjorkman 1-6, 6-1, 6-2.
On the other side, there’s defending champion Djokovic, as well as fifth-seeded Spaniard David Ferrer, eighth-seeded Andy Murray of Britain, and ninth-seded Swiss Stanislas Wawrinka — who won their matches Wednesday — and of course, Nadal.
The Spaniard seemed to have the support of the fans at the beginning of his match against Levine. One fan waved a Spanish flag with “Vamos Rafa” scrawled across it.
Some support swayed over to Levine’s side as the plucky 20-year-old took an early lead and played Nadal tough.
“I think they really got behind me a lot of times, and that was helpful,” said Levine, who moved to Florida when he was 13 and represents the U.S. in international play. “There was a lot of Rafa supporters out there. I was trying to hold my own and hoping to get some support behind me, and I felt like there was.”
Levine said he was rolling until he stopped to think about whom he was playing, and where.
“I think I was in that zone, not sure really where I was, and then I kind of came to my senses and realized that I’m playing Nadal on center court,” he said. “Obviously, nerves got a little bit of me there.”

TITLE: Disguised War Crimes Fugitive Arrested in Belgrade
AUTHOR: By Dusan Stojanovic
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BELGRADE — For more than a decade, the world’s most-wanted war crimes fugitive displayed a talent for eluding international justice. His secret? Hide in plain sight.
In a ruse worthy of any thriller, Radovan Karadzic transformed himself from a leader instantly recognizable by his famous shock of salt-and-pepper hair into a man resembling a New Age mystic, with a flowing white beard and black robe.
Believed to be protected by a coterie of ultra-nationalists, the former Bosnian Serb strongman — a doctor and psychiatrist who received training in the U.S. — worked at an alternative medicine clinic in Belgrade.
Karadzic’s disguise was so effective that prosecutors say he walked freely around town without being noticed and even his landlords didn’t know his true identity.
A photograph displayed by prosecutors at a news conference Tuesday showed a gaunt elderly man unrecognizable from the robust warlord who strutted brashly before his troops during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
That life on the run ended abruptly with Karadzic’s capture Monday — an arrest made possible by the election of a new pro-Western government that tightened the dragnet around the war crimes suspect.
Many observers have long suspected that recently fallen prime minister Vojislav Kostunica, a nationalist with close ties to Karadzic during the Bosnian war, had shielded him from arrest.
Karadzic’s capture has broad political implications — for the future of the UN war crimes tribunal, eventual closure of the cycle of Balkan blood feuds and for Serbia’s fitful journey out of international isolation.
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader stands accused of genocide for masterminding the deadly siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst carnage since the end of World War II.
The fugitive had been masquerading as an expert in “human quantum energy” using the fake name “D.D. David” printed on his business card. The initials apparently stood for Dragan Dabic, an alias authorities said he used.
He even had his own web site — http://www.psy-help-energy.com — and gave lectures before hundreds of people on alternative medicine. The site displays pictures of metallic bullet-shaped amulets and Orthodox crosses with wires running out of them.
TV footage provided by a local station to Associated Press Television News shows Karadzic sitting on a panel at a medical conference, glancing nervously at the cameraman next to him — another glimpse into his knife’s-edge life of hiding in plain view.
Using his alias, Karadzic was a regular contributor to the Serbian alternative medicine magazine “Healthy Life;” its editor Goran Kojic said he was stunned when he saw the photo of Karadzic on TV and realized the bizarre truth.
“It never even occurred to me that this man with a long white beard and hair was Karadzic,” said Kojic. “He was eloquent and a bit strange, like a true bohemian.”
Karadzic’s whereabouts had been a mystery since he went on the run in 1998, with his hideouts reportedly including monasteries and mountain caves in remote eastern Bosnia. The U.S. set a $5 million bounty for his arrest.
For years it has been widely assumed that Karadzic’s whereabouts were known to nationalist supporters and even to high-ranking Serbian officials. One cartoon depicted Karadzic clandestinely enjoying the company of Kostunica himself. But in the murky labyrinth of postwar Serbia, such accusations could never quite be proven.
The picture painted by officials suggested a successful search — as opposed to the end of protection.
But few in Serbia failed to link the capture to the recent establishment of a largely pro-Western government committed to bringing Serbia into the European Union, which has been demanding the handover of war criminals.
EU officials said Tuesday the arrest would boost Serbia’s EU prospects.
The arrest signals “the commitment of Serbia to continue the rapprochement to the European Union,” French UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said in New York, speaking for the EU.
“Europeans want Serbia to be part of the European Union, and this last development is certainly a very good sign of this willingness,” added Ripert, whose nation holds the EU’s rotating presidency for the second half of this year.
Serbian security services said they found Karadzic on Monday while looking for another top war crimes suspect facing genocide charges, Bosnian Serb wartime commander Gen. Ratko Mladic. The connection — why the search for one led to the other — was not explained.
Prosecutors said Karadzic was arrested while waiting for a bus in a grim part of Belgrade known as a nationalist stronghold. Authorities refused to reveal more details, saying Karadzic’s movements were being analyzed and would be kept secret until Mladic’s capture.
During the siege of Sarajevo that began in 1992, Bosnian Serb troops starved, sniped at and bombarded the population, operating from strongholds in Pale and Vraca high above the city, and controlling nearly all roads in and out.
Inhabitants were kept alive by a fragile lifeline of food aid and supplies provided by UN donors and peacekeepers. The siege was not officially over until February 1996. An estimated 10,000 people died in Sarajevo.
By the war’s end in late 1995, an estimated 250,000 people were dead and another 1.8 million driven from their homes.
Under the UN indictment, Karadzic faces 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 to 1996.

TITLE: Pakistan Warns U.S.-Indian Deal May Add to Arms Race
AUTHOR: By George Jahn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VIENNA — Pakistan has warned a deal leading to increased Indian access to nuclear fuel could accelerate the atomic arms race between the rivals, according to a letter obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.
The letter was given to the AP a day after India’s government won a confidence vote that paved the way for a landmark deal on nuclear energy cooperation with the United States. To finalize the U.S. deal, India must strike separate agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the Nuclear Suppliers Group of countries that export nuclear material. Then Congress will need to approve the accord.
The agreements would end more than three decades of nuclear isolation for India, opening its civilian reactors to international inspections in exchange for the nuclear fuel and technology it has been denied because of its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its testing of atomic weapons.
India imports about 75 percent of its oil, and the prime minister has argued the country needs the nuclear deal to power its financial growth and lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.
The 35-nation IAEA board is expected to approve on Aug. 1 a safeguards agreement setting up rules for inspecting some of India’s civilian nuclear facilities. Approval of the safeguards deal is key in India’s efforts to gain access to legal imports of nuclear fuel and technology from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.
Pakistan’s letter dated July 18 addressed more than 60 nations including members of the IAEA board and Nuclear Suppliers Group. It warned the safeguards agreement would hurt nonproliferation efforts and “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent.”
Predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have fought three wars since they were created in the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.
Relations have improved considerably since the start of a peace process in 2004. But progress at the talks has been slow and deep distrust remains between the two rivals, which developed their nuclear arms in secret.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group bans exports to nuclear weapons states such as India and Pakistan that have not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and do not have full safeguard agreements allowing the U.N. nuclear watchdog to inspect their facilities. But the Nuclear Suppliers Group is ready to consider a waiver for India, in part due to lobbying from Washington.

TITLE: Olympic Soccer Divides
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BEIJING — Despite being the world’s most popular sport, soccer usually takes a back seat at the Olympics, dwarfed by track and field, swimming and gymnastics.
Even though the likes of Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi are going to China, the spotlight won’t really swing toward them until late in the tournament.
Yet Olympic soccer is already making waves. Clubs are refusing to release their stars even though the players have been called up by countries searching for an elusive gold medal.
The teams argue that this is an irrelevant and poorly timed tournament in which the International Olympic Committee and soccer’s world governing body are trying to give soccer a higher profile at the games.
For decades, Olympic soccer was played by so-called amateurs and dominated by teams from the former Soviet bloc. The big stars from Western countries, who were paid, weren’t allowed to take part.
Now the Olympics are open to professionals in all sports. The prospect of an Olympic gold medal has prompted some of the big names to join their rising stars. While 21-year-old Argentina star Messi falls into the age category, 28-year-old Ronaldinho has decided to join the Brazilian squad to try and add another title to is already impressive resume.
With 16 teams taking part and a final in the Olympic stadium Aug. 23, the IOC and FIFA hope that soccer will maintain its growth within the Olympics after standout performances in recent games by gold-medal winners Nigeria (1996), Cameroon (2000) and Argentina (2004).
So those in charge of Olympic soccer hoped that the clubs would be proud to field someone who had won an Olympic gold medal.
Far from it, apparently.
The clubs, who pay the players’ salaries, are preparing for the start of domestic seasons that begin during the Olympics.
Although Germany doesn’t have a team in the men’s competition in China, some of the Bundesliga clubs don’t want their Brazilian stars to go.
Schalke refused to release defender Rafinha for the tournament. He failed to show up for the club’s training camp and instead joined the Brazilian Olympic squad. Werder Bremen midfielder Diego wants to go to the Olympics, but his club was expecting him to arrive for training Tuesday.
And it’s not just Brazilians.
Hertha Berlin won’t let striker Marko Pantelic play for Serbia, Hamburger SV doesn’t want to release of Belgium defender Vincent Kompany and Bayer Leverkusen has said no to Constant Djakpa of Ivory Coast.
On Monday, two weeks after Brazil announced its Olympic squad, Real Madrid reported that striker Robinho had injured his groin and asked for his release from the trip to China. The club says it’s better for him to be assessed for preseason in Spain rather than in China.
The squads have been announced and the players are preparing for China.

TITLE: Defiant Sudan Leader Visits Darfur
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: EL GENEINA, Sudan  — A smiling Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir pressed ahead with a heavily guarded tour of Darfur on Thursday, with a rally called to defy accusations that he masterminded genocide in the region.
Wearing a safari suit and sunglasses, and smiling widely, he sat in a giant armchair in the shade at a rally attended by hundreds of loyalists who fanned themselves under the burning sun in the West Darfur state capital El Geneina.
He is the first head of state accused by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on 10 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, gripped by more than five years of war.
He faces a possible international arrest warrant for allegedly ordering his forces to annihilate three non-Arab groups in Darfur, masterminding murder, torture, pillaging and using rape to commit genocide.
On his first Darfur visit in a year, on Wednesday Beshir danced and waved his walking stick before thousands of supporters in El Fasher and Nyala, the two other state capitals under firm government control in Darfur.
“What Ocampo said about Darfur is lies... We have to find a solution to the Darfur crisis,” Beshir told people made homeless in El Fasher.
Beshir has inaugurated development projects and met state and UN peacekeeping officials, but has avoided the sprawling, impoverished camps for the more than 2.2 million people estimated to have been displaced by the war.
In El Geneina, he was greeted at the airport by the strains of the Sudanese national anthem from a military band before his heavily armed convoy guarded by police, army and national security drove to an organized reception ceremony.
The few people who came out onto the streets kept quiet and did not cheer as the convoy swept past, said an AFP correspondent.
Two helicopters circled overhead as children, students, local government employees, tribesmen and women attended an organized rally.
The United Nations says that up to 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million have fled their homes since the conflict erupted in February 2003. Sudan says 10,000 have been killed.
The war began when African ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on earth.
Beshir’s regime is trying to persuade the UN Security Council to freeze possible legal proceedings should International Criminal Court judges actually issue an arrest warrant, charging that it could jeopardize peace prospects.
West Darfur shares a porous border with Chad. Sudan and Chad agreed to restore relations, severed by Khartoum over accusations that Ndjamena backed a rebel attack on the capital in May, just days after Ocampo’s announcement.
Top Western and Arab diplomats, who on Thursday flew into El Geneina on a UN aircraft, have accompanied Beshir. They include U.S. charge d’affaires Alberto Fernandez and British ambassador Rosalind Marsden.
In Nyala, the president accused France, where one of the main Darfur rebel leaders Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur lives in exile, of damaging peace efforts and ordered the release of 89 children arrested after a rebel attack on Khartoum.
An Arab League official said Sudan had agreed to set up special courts to try alleged human rights abuses in Darfur that will be monitored by the United Nations, African Union and Arab League.
In an interview published on Thursday, the outgoing head of UN peacekeeping justified a reluctance to send large numbers of peacekeepers to Darfur, where a UN-led mission is running at a third of its billed capacity.
“I would say very bluntly that there are good reasons to be hesitant,” Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Financial Times.
“There is not enough of a political process (in Darfur) for a peacekeeping operation to be really successful.”
“The danger is that you go do something and then, if you go into a failure, you compromise an instrument that could make a real difference in other places,” he said.

TITLE: Tottenham Hotspur Reportedly Considering Arshavin
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: As Zenit St. Petersburg was saying it hadn’t received a satisfactory offer for midfielder Andrei Arshavin and that he would probably remain with the club, English club Tottenham Hotspur was reported to be weighing up bids for both Arshavin and fellow Russia international Roman Pavlyuchenko.
In a brief statement posted on Zenit’s web site Monday, team general director Maxim Mitrofanov said that although Zenit’s contract with Arshavin, 27, remains in force “we offered the player the possibility of joining the summer transfer campaign.” 
Arshavin was to have determined by July 1, later extended to July 15, which team he would go to — if the terms were satisfactory to Zenit. But “as of today, July 21, there have been no proposals that would be of interest to the player and the club,” Mitrofanov said. 
Barcelona had offered $24 million, but broke off talks two weeks ago after refusing to raise its offer. The statement did not specify which other clubs had made offers. 
On Tuesday, London’s Independent newspaper reported that Tottenham, facing the prospect of losing their three first-choice strikers over the next two weeks, is considering bids for Arshavin and Pavlyuchenko. 
Tottenham is reported to remain interested in Arshavin but to regard Zenit’s asking price to be too high.
“With Tottenham we have contacts,” Zenit sporting director Konstantin Sarsaniya was quoted as saying by the Independent. “[Tottenhham] is really interested in acquiring Andrei but, as I understand, 27 million euros [$42.5 million] is too high a price for them. Tottenham is ready to pay in the region of 20 million euros [$31 million].”
The London club expressed interest in Pavlyuchenko earlier this summer, with his club of Spartak Moscow claiming that it received an offer of around $20 million (12.7 million euros) — considerably less than it hopes to get for Russia’s other standout player at Euro 2008.
(AP, SPT)