SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1403 (67), Friday, August 29, 2008
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TITLE: EU Seeks Common Response To Russia
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev, Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: The European Union is likely to issue a condemnation of Russia’s recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia at an extraordinary summit in Brussels on Monday.
But while some European politicians have called for sanctions, the meeting might shy away from imposing painful economic or political measures based on concerns that Europe is just as dependent on Russia as Russia is on Europe.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called President Dmitry Medvedev Wednesday and repeated an earlier demand that Russia withdraws its troops in Georgia.
“The continuing Russian presence … in [the Georgian port of] Poti is a grave violation of the six-point plan,” Merkel told Medvedev, referring to the truce brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to end the conflict in Georgia, according to a statement released by the German government.
Merkel condemned Medvedev’s decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the statement said.
Sarkozy said in a speech to diplomats in Paris on Monday that the outcome of Russia’s behavior in relation to South Ossetia and Abkhazia would “define the long-term relations of the European Union with Russia.”
Medvedev said in interviews with international television networks late Tuesday that the country was not looking for the return of a Cold War scenario or international isolation, but was prepared to bear the brunt of international measures if the West decides to punish Russia and stop cooperation.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called for just that in an address to Ukrainian students in Kiev on Wednesday. He demanded that the West re-examine “the nature, depth and breadth of relations” and “to raise the cost for Russia for disregarding its responsibility,” Reuters reported.
In what appeared to be a conciliatory move, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia was ready to pull out of buffer zones it has manned with soldiers in Georgia after monitors from the United Nations and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe were on the ground and ready to take their place.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov said the consensus among the country’s diplomats was that the summit was unlikely to end with the imposition of sanctions but that Moscow should be prepared for a chorus of condemnation. “European countries are strongly dependent upon Russian energy supplies, and European businesses have strong interests in Russia. They will have to take this into consideration,” Lyakin-Frolov said.
Taneli Lahti, the head of the political section of the EU’s delegation to Moscow, said the summit would deal more with Georgia than Russia.
“The main point will be how to help Georgia and support the stability of the region in general,” he said.
Broader issues related to ties with Moscow would be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of next week, he said.
Lahti refused to speculate about what the ministers might decide.
But the head of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Polish deputy Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, said the summit, which was initiated by Warsaw, among others, should also look at further steps against Russia.
“The European Council will have to consider the consequences of Moscow’s noncompliance with the six-points accord brokered by France,” he said.

TITLE: SCO Snubs Russian Appeal for Support
AUTHOR: By Olga Tutbalina and Peter Leonard
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — China and several Central Asian nations rebuffed Russia’s hopes of international support for its actions in Georgia, issuing a statement Thursday denouncing the use of force and calling for respect for every country’s territorial integrity.
A joint declaration from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization also offered some support for Russia’s “active role in promoting peace” following a cease-fire, but overall it appeared to increase Moscow’s international isolation.
France, meanwhile, said the European Union was considering imposing sanctions against Russia.
“Sanctions are being considered ... and many other means as well,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said at a news conference in Paris. He did not elaborate.
The West has already criticized Russia for what it calls a disproportionate use of force in fighting this month with Georgia, its small southern neighbor that wants to join NATO.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had appealed to the Asian alliance — whose members include Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — for unanimous support of Moscow’s response to Georgia’s “aggression.”
But none of the other alliance members joined Russia in recognizing the independence claims of Georgia’s separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Medvedev’s search for support in Asia had raised fears that the alliance would turn the furor over Georgia into a broader confrontation between East and West, pitting the U.S. and Europe against their two main Cold War foes.
But China has traditionally been wary of endorsing separatists abroad, mindful of its own problems with Tibet and Muslims in the western territory of Xinjiang. The unanimously endorsed joint statement made a point of stressing the sanctity of borders — two days after Russia sought to redraw Georgia’s territory.
“The participants ... underscore the need for respect of the historical and cultural traditions of each country and each people, and for efforts aimed at preserving the unity of the state and its territorial integrity,” the declaration said.
“Relying exclusively on the use of force has no prospects and hinders a comprehensive settlement of local conflicts,” the declaration added, in what could also be seen as criticism of Georgia, which tried to retake South Ossetia by force.
The alliance statement also expressed “deep concern” over the conflict and urged “the appropriate sides to resolve the existing problems through peaceful dialogue and apply efforts to reconciliation and promotion of negotiations.”
At the same time, the carefully crafted statement offered some praise of Moscow’s actions, at least in the context of the peace deal signed five days after the war began, on the night of Aug. 7.
“The SCO member states welcome the adoption in Moscow on Aug. 12, 2008, of the six principles of resolving the conflict in South Ossetia and support the active role of Russia in promoting peace and cooperation in the given region,” the statement said.
The four Central Asian members of the group — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — all seemed reluctant to damage their relations with Europe and the U.S.
Kazakhstan enjoys significant Western investment in its rich hydrocarbon sector, and impoverished Kyrgyzstan earns $150 million in aid and rent for hosting a U.S. air base that supports military operations in Afghanistan.
But overall, the summit highlighted Russia’s isolation.
Despite continuing Western protests and a visit by U.S. warships to Georgia’s Black Sea coast, Russian troops remain at checkpoints inside areas controlled by Georgia prior to the recent conflict.
While a cease-fire agreement calls for both sides to withdraw to their previous positions, the Kremlin says the agreement allows Russian forces to occupy “security zones” outside the rebel regions.
In a rare gesture of conciliation Thursday, Russian forces turned over 12 Georgian soldiers on the border of Abkhazia. The Georgians were seized Aug. 18 and paraded — blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs — on top of Russian armored vehicles.
The soldiers appeared unharmed Thursday, and some were smiling.
But there was also fresh conflict in the region. South Ossetia claimed to have shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane that was scouting the skies over the republic. Georgia denied the report.
Russia responded to Georgia’s military offensive on South Ossetia by sending hundreds of tanks rolling into the rebel region, pushing Georgian troops out of South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, before driving deep into Georgia proper.
On Tuesday, Russia recognized both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent, a move that set off another storm of criticism from the West. The two regions make up roughly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory.
The West accuses Russia of excessive force in response to the Georgian offensive, of failing to meet its troop withdrawal commitments under an EU-brokered cease-fire and of violating international law in recognizing the two separatist regions.
In Dushanbe, Medvedev blamed Georgia for the conflict. The alliance, he said, would send a “serious signal to those who are trying to justify the aggression” by endorsing Russia’s actions.
But Russia has so far found little unequivocal support, even among stalwart foes of the U.S.
Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said he was surprised that even Cuba and Venezuela had not yet followed Russia’s lead in recognizing the separatist Georgian regions.
“The Soviet Union was not so alone even in 1968,” he said on Ekho Moskvy radio, referring to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed a liberal reform movement in the Warsaw Pact nation.
In Vienna, a senior Georgian official said Russian forces and their armed allies have driven all Georgians out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and were now ethnically cleansing villages in other areas of Georgia.
“As of now, we can say with confidence that in both regions — Abkhazia and Ossetia — ethnic cleansing is fully completed,” Eka Tkeshelashvili told reporters at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
“They’ve expelled from all villages remnants of the Georgian population — they’ve destroyed their houses, they’ve looted their property, they’ve burned down their fields, forests,” she said.
The Russian ambassador to the Vienna-based organization, Anvar Azimov, denied the charge.
The joint statement in Dushanbe offered thinly veiled criticism of the West — but some leaders at the summit went further.
Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country has observer status with the alliance, accused “Western powers” of interfering in Central Asia and hindering its independent development.
“Their unilateral actions are continuing,” Ahmadinejad said.
He has worked hard to gain membership for his country in the alliance, but so far those efforts have failed. Medvedev said the door was open to enlargement but did not mention Iran, according to the RIA-Novosti news agency.
In addition to Iran, several other countries attended as observers, including India, Pakistan, Mongolia and Afghanistan, whose delegation was headed by President Hamid Karzai.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was created in 2001 to improve regional coordination on terrorism and border security.

TITLE: Report Lists Caucasus Cities Among Those Freest of Crime
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Looking to move to a peaceful, crime-free neighborhood? Try the North Caucasus republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia.
These violence-plagued regions were rated among the most crime-free in the country by the Krasnoyarsk-based think tank Region, which has published a report analyzing Interior Ministry data from 2002 to 2007 to determine the safest Russian regions, cities and towns.
Ingushetia, which has seen a spike in deadly attacks in recent months, was rated the country’s least criminal region, with just 39 crimes per 10,000 residents annually. The runners-up were Dagestan and Chechnya, with 52 and 55 crimes per 10,000 residents, respectively.
The Perm region, meanwhile, was the most criminal of the 82 provinces analyzed in the study, with an average of 382 registered offenses per 10,000 residents annually — 1.8 times the national rate. 
But you might want to wait before packing your belongings and heading for Nazran, Grozny or Makhachkala: The official statistics may reveal more about the ministry’s inconsistent system for registering crimes than about the true safety of Russia’s streets.
Corruption and varying registration practices across the country have long made establishing crime trends problematic in Russia. In October 2005, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev described the state of affairs at police stations across the country as “catastrophic,” with rank-and-file officers widely corrupted and detectives whitewashing statistics.
Police officers’ practice of boosting crime-solving rates by manipulating statistics, a practice known in police jargon as “chopping sticks,” is common nationwide.
Gross falsifications in crime registration do account for the low official crime rates in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, said Sergei Iliy, a senior researcher with the Interior Ministry’s Scientific Research Institute.
But while it may seem counterintuitive to think of these republics — which have been ravaged by wars, terrorism and organized crime over the past 15 years — as safe, cultural specifics there do lead to less registered crimes, Iliy said.
“First, many people are Muslims there, and they do not drink as much as people in central Russia and Siberia do,” Iliy said. “Second, the average criminal is a male between 20 and 30 years old, and many such men born in the Northern Caucasus have simply moved [to different regions].”
Furthermore, people in the North Caucasus often prefer to settle conflicts among themselves rather than turning to police, Iliy added.
Andrei Pokhmelkin, a researcher with the Independent Legal Council, said there is a “general mistrust” of law enforcement institutions in the North Caucasus and that “informal laws dating back to medieval traditions restrain people there.”
Interior Ministry and independent criminologists interviewed for this report said it was not surprising, however, that the Perm region, an industrial province in the Ural Mountains, was rated the country’s most crime-ridden. 
Unemployment, poverty and social stratification in Perm are exacerbated by large number of ex-convicts from the region’s 49 prisons, they said.
One-sixth of the region’s 3 million adult residents have prison records, said Yulia Orlova, a criminologist with the Perm regional branch of the Interior Ministry.
“I know families in which three generations were registered offenders,” Orlova said. 
Every third inmate released from a Perm prison commits a crime before leaving the region, according to police statistics.
While crime is a serious problem in Perm, the region’s high crime rate may be due in part to local bureaucratic practices, Orlova said.
“We once had a study on why bicycle theft and robbery is so high in Perm while in Moscow it is almost nonexistent,” Orlova said. “Initially, we thought thieves in Perm place a higher value on bicycles because incomes are lower than in Moscow, where every family can afford to buy one.”
As it turns out, Perm police register every stolen bicycle complaint, while Moscow police typically demand that victims present documents proving that they owned the bicycle before agreeing to register a crime, Orlova said. 
“A receipt is just such a document, but who keeps a receipt?” Orlova said. “So many victims in Moscow just leave without filing a complaint.”
While police can easily manipulate statistics related to nonviolent crimes such as theft or hooliganism, it is far more difficult conceal grave offenses, above all murders, Iliy said.

TITLE: U.S.-Russia Nuclear Deal May Be Shelved
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A key civil nuclear agreement between Russia and the U.S. looks likely to be shelved until next year at the earliest amid mounting tensions over the fate of Georgia’s breakaway republics.
The nuclear pact — signed last May — set the framework to give the U.S. access to Russian state-of-the-art nuclear technologies, while helping Russia establish an international nuclear fuel storage facility for spent fuel. Russia cannot achieve that goal without the deal, since the U.S. controls the vast majority of the world’s nuclear fuel.
The Bush administration submitted the bill to Congress the same month, with hopes it would be passed into law by September.
But after the war between Russia and Georgia earlier this month — where Russia’s actions have drawn sharp criticism from the West — both U.S. and Russian officials say that now looks unlikely.
A Russian government official familiar with the nuclear industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted on the issue, said Moscow had received a friendly hint that the bill would be recalled and that the Russians expect it to be resubmitted after a new president is installed in the White House next year.
But other officials criticized for Washington’s methods.
“If we are working on the basis of our mutual interests, then it’s logical to implement this agreement,” said Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. “This is an old way of doing things, that has nothing to do with modern realities.”
On her way to Tel Aviv earlier this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the focus was now on a civil nuclear deal with India.
Days earlier, presidential candidate Barack Obama’s running mate Senator Joe Biden said after a fact-finding mission to Georgia that Russia’s actions in Georgia have “erased” hopes of advancing collaboration on nuclear energy production.
“Primarily, I think [the U.S.] was looking for things to take away and penalize Russia for in Georgia,” said Henry Sokolski, executive director at the U.S.-based Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center. “This is a vote of no confidence in improving U.S.-Russian relations.”
Analysts said that Russia would want to keep the deal moving. “Russia doesn’t want [to lose] this,” said Sergei Mikheyev, a political analyst at the Center for Political Technologies.

TITLE: U.S. Military Vessel Arrives in Batumi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BATUMI, Georgia — A U.S. military ship docked at a southern Georgian port Wednesday, prompting Russia to send three of its military ships to another Georgian port, the tit-for-tat moves underscoring an escalating standoff between Moscow and the West.
The dockings came a day after President Dmitry Medvedev recognized two Georgian separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, prompting harsh criticism from Western nations.
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Dallas, carrying 34 tons of humanitarian aid, docked in the Black Sea port of Batumi, south of the zone of this month’s fighting between Russia and Georgia. The arrival avoided Georgia’s main cargo port of Poti, which is still controlled by Russian soldiers.
The U.S. Embassy in Georgia had earlier said the ship was headed to Poti but then retracted its statement. 
Zaza Gogava, head of Georgia’s joint forces command, said that Poti could have been mined by Russian forces and that it still contained several sunken Georgian ships hit in the fighting.
Poti’s port reportedly suffered heavy damage from the Russian military. In addition, Russian troops have established checkpoints on the northern approach to the city, and a U.S. ship docking there could have been seen as a direct challenge.
Meanwhile, the Russian missile cruiser Aurora and two missile boats anchored at the port of Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, some 300 kilometers north of Batumi. The Russian Navy says the ships will be involved in peacekeeping operations.
Although Western nations have called the Russian military presence in Poti a clear violation of a European Union-brokered cease-fire, a top Russian general has called using warships to deliver aid “devilish.”
Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn warned that NATO has already exhausted the number of forces it can have in the Black Sea, according to international agreements, and warned Western nations against sending more ships.
“Can NATO — which is not a state located on the Black Sea — continuously increase its group of forces and systems there? It turns out that it cannot,” Nogovitsyn said Wednesday, Interfax reported.
Many of the Russian troops that drove deep into Georgia after fighting broke out Aug. 7 in the separatist region of South Ossetia have pulled back, but hundreds are estimated still to be manning checkpoints that Russia calls “security zones” inside Georgia proper.
Western leaders assailed Russia for violating Georgia’s territorial sovereignty and the Georgian government said Wednesday that it would withdraw some of its diplomats from Moscow.
“We cannot accept these violations of international law ... of a territory by the army of a neighboring country,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in Paris, echoing statements from European capitals and Washington.

TITLE: Russia Succeeds In Long-Range Tests for Missiles
AUTHOR: By Chris Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia successfully tested a long-range Topol missile designed to avoid detection by anti-missile defence systems from its Plesetsk launch site, a Russian military spokesman said on Thursday.
“The launch was specially tasked to test the missile’s capability to avoid ground-based detection systems,” said Colonel Alexander Vovk of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces.
Washington and Warsaw formally signed a deal last week to station elements of a U.S. missile defence shield in Poland, a move that has aggravated Russian-Western tensions already raw from Moscow’s intervention in Georgia.
Russia has heaped scorn on the missile defence system, which the U.S. says is aimed at Iran, and through its Foreign Ministry last week vowed “to react, and not only through diplomatic protests.”

TITLE: New Oil Retailer in City
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Norwegian state-owned oil company StatoilHydro is entering the St. Petersburg retail gas market, making it the third international player in Russia’s northwest, competing with Britain’s Shell and Finland’s Neste, along with dozens of domestic operators which already have a network of more than 350 gasoline stations between them.   
StatoilHydro, which owns around 2,000 gas stations in seven countries — but none so far in the Leningrad Oblast or St. Petersburg — is not a newcomer to the Russian market, having eight gas stations in the Murmansk Oblast, the first of which was opened in 1993. 
At the end of 2007, soon after the merger of Statoil and Norsk Hydro which produced StatoilHydro, the company signed a partnership agreement with the St. Petersburg Real Estate Foundation, which was contracted to find several plots for the company on which to construct a network of around 40 gas stations, preferably located close to major traffic routes or at intersections with the city’s suburbs, the foundation’s director, Andrei Stepanenko, told Vedomosti this week. 
“The company is interested in purchasing 49-year contracts for land plots measuring from 2,500 square meters up to one hectare with water supply and sewage facilities, access to mains electricity and located in St. Petersburg,” a posting on the official website of Statoil Energy and Retail Russia, StatoilHydro’s daughter company, reads.
Although the signing of the partnership agreement was confirmed by City Hall, StatoilHydro’s officials declined to comment on whether any land plots had been selected or purchased. But according to various sources, the Norwegians have already acquired three plots on the Pulkovo, Murmansk and Tallinn highways. 
The estimated cost of a purchase in that area could total around $4 million to $6 million, said Andrei Arzamastsev, the CEO of Shell AZS (Shell Gasoline Stations Russia) in an interview with Vedomosti. Arzamastsev said he believes there is enough land on the secondary market, but not all of the plots are suitable for the construction of a gas station. 
Some experts say that such a choice of location implies that StatoilHydro is mostly focusing on its corporate clients from the Murmansk Oblast and Estonia, who follow the same transit routes and have an interest in refueling their vehicles from a trusted operator at a discount.  
“The corporate client market is not an easy option, due to the numerous financial obligations involved,” said Leonid Churilov, deputy CEO of Peterburgskaya Toplivnaya Kompaniya (St. Petersburg Oil Company), or PTK. “PTK is experienced in dealing with several corporate clients located in the city, including the police, ambulance service and others. With them, our logistics in oil and gas supplies has to be 100-percent fail-proof to ensure the efficient performance of such vitally important institutions.”  
With the arrival of another player from abroad, the St. Petersburg oil retail market will experience a rise in competition, say analysts. StatoilHydro’s major rivals in Russia’s northwest are not only dozens of local operators with more than 250 gasoline stations, but also Finland’s Neste, which was established in 1990 and has around 50 outlets in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, and Great Britain’s Shell, which has a network of 45 gasoline stations in the European part of Russia.
“StatoilHydro’s share in the retail market may reach 12 percent,” said Natalya Milchakova, director of the analysis department at Otkritie Financial Corporation. She expressed doubt that the company’s arrival in St. Petersburg would bring about a reduction in the price of gasoline in the area, because global oil prices are high and are continuing to climb.

TITLE: Nevsky Transport Redesigned
AUTHOR: By Boris Kamchev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of the city’s historic center, is to be cleared of marshrutki, or public minibuses, according to a regulation passed at a recent meeting of City Hall’s Committee for the Organization of Road Traffic. The regulation, which is expected to come into force in October, also limits the amount of cargo traffic on the city’s vast road network.
Marshrutki will leave Nevsky from Nov. 1, when 15 commercial routes will be canceled and another nine routes will be altered so that they do not include the street. 
According to City Hall’s press center, Piteravto — the only commercial transport company that will retain the right to provide passenger transport on Nevsky Prospekt — will introduce three new routes. The old minibuses will be traded in for more comfortable buses and trolleybuses. 
“The stipulated route network will fully cover the one covered by the current commercial mini-buses which will leave Nevsky,” the committee’s president Stanislav Popov was quoted as saying by local news agencies.
A journey on the buses or trolleybuses along Nevsky will cost the same price as the city’s other public transport routes — 16 rubles ($0.64). A City Hall official said that the difference between the price of tickets and the real expenditures incurred by the transport company will be compensated by the city budget.
“A policy of unified tariffs is correct, because all citizens should have equal rights to local transport,” said Alexander Polyukeev, deputy governor of St. Petersburg.
The new routes will connect the city center with Vasilievsky Island, the Petrograd Side and the Rzhevka district.
Some small commercial transport companies are not satisfied with the city’s decision to remove the marshrutki from Nevsky Prospekt.
“The regulation will halve our profits, because this is the busiest street in the whole city,” said one professional driver who refused to give his name for fear of losing his job.
City Hall said that the public bus routes will continue to be operated by state-run Pasazhiravtotrans, which will provide nineteen new buses. State-run Gorelektrotrans will also provide another seventy trolleybuses for its Nevsky Prospekt service. The total number of public transport vehicles operating on the city’s main avenue will almost double from 137 to 255 vehicles.
“The increase in vehicles will cover the current passenger volume of the marshrutki,” said Polyukeev.
City officials said that after the resurfacing of Nevsky Prospekt is complete, one lane will be reserved for public transport with the aim of easing the heavy traffic congestion along the street. 
The new regulation also bans heavy vehicles from many streets. To deliver goods to the city center, cargo trucks will have to obtain special passes.

TITLE: LUKoil Investigated Over Monopoly
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Wednesday that it was investigating the country’s second-biggest oil producer, LUKoil, on suspicion of barring a smaller rival from using its pipeline in the Komi republic.
A more liberal access to pipelines is one of the key goals that the competition watchdog is pursuing. It is also seeking a government decision that would make Gazprom more accountable in running its pipelines.
A small oil producer, Nobel Oil, complained that a LUKoil unit banned it from shipping its associated gas, a byproduct of oil production, via a LUKoil-owned pipeline, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said in a statement.
“Having studied the situation, the [service’s] Komi branch saw signs of a breach of the law in LUKoil-Komi’s actions,” the government watchdog said.
Pipeline shipments of gas fall under the law that defends competition, it said. The anti-monopoly service demanded that both sides submit documents about the matter by Sept. 12. 
A service spokesman declined to elaborate.
LUKoil considers the pipeline its private property, a spokesman said. “Perhaps, we have the right to decide who we give access to,” he said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy.
LUKoil will submit the documents by the deadline, the spokesman said.
A Nobel Oil official said that company president Grigory Gurevich was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

TITLE: VimpelCom Profits Up 31%, iPhone to Follow
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — VimpelCom, Russia’s second-largest mobile-phone company, reported a 31 percent increase in second-quarter profit on added subscribers and said it agreed to start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G in Russia this year.
Net income climbed to $470.2 million from $359.3 million a year earlier, the company said in a PR Newswire statement Thursday. Sales rose to $2.61 billion from $1.72 billion under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. Profit had been seen at $470.5 million on revenue of $2.6 billion, the median estimates of 10 analysts in a Bloomberg survey by phone and e-mail.
VimpelCom acquired Russian phone and Internet provider Golden Telecom Inc. for $4.3 billion on Feb. 29, boosting revenue. Moscow-based VimpelCom and domestic competitors Mobile TeleSystems and MegaFon are profiting from the 10th straight year of economic growth in Russia, increasing demand for phone services.
“The increase in revenue was driven by fast organic growth in both our mobile and fixed-line operations as well as by the first full quarter consolidation of Golden Telecom,” Chief Executive Officer Alexander Izosimov said in the statement.

TITLE: Ruble Slumps As Investors Reduce Funds
AUTHOR: By Emma O’Brien
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble is set for its biggest monthly decline against the dollar-euro basket since its introduction in 2005 as tensions with the U.S. and European Union prompt investors to reduce holdings of Russian assets.
The currency was poised on Thursday to lose 0.7 percent versus the basket this week after Russia recognized two breakaway regions in neighboring Georgia on Tuesday, following a five-day conflict over the separatist territories earlier this month. Russia’s benchmark 30-year government bond slipped for a third day.
“Rising tensions with the West are giving investors the jitters and they’ve been pulling their money from Russia,” said Stanislav Ponomarenko, head of research in Moscow at ING Bank NV.
“Downward pressure on the ruble still prevails.” 
The currency was poised to lose 1.8 percent against the basket in August, the biggest monthly fall since the mechanism was introduced in February 2005. The basket rate is calculated by multiplying the ruble’s rate to the dollar by 0.55, the euro rate by 0.45, and then adding the two numbers together.
Bank Rossii, Russia’s central bank, keeps the ruble within a trading band against the basket to limit the impact of its fluctuations on the competitiveness of local exports.
As much as $25 billion in capital has flowed out of Russia since the start of the Georgia crisis, according to BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, in a client note e-mailed Thursday.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged leaders in China and four Central Asian nations to strengthen their energy ties as the European Union, Russia’s largest energy market, considered imposing sanctions in response to the Georgia conflict. Medvedev is also seeking support for his endorsement of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a move condemned by the U.S. and some EU states.
The ruble rose for a second day against the dollar because of the U.S. currency’s weakness, ING’s Ponomarenko said. The dollar slipped against all 16 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg as the price of oil climbed for a fourth day, threatening growth in the world’s largest energy market.
”Local ruble traders pay close attention to the dollar-euro rate and then adjust their dollar bids against the ruble accordingly,” Ponomarenko said. “It’s something that happens automatically.”
The dollar fell 0.5 percent against the euro.
ING Bank, a unit of the largest Dutch financial-services company ING Groep, recommends investors take advantage of the ruble’s weakness to place long positions versus the basket, Ponomarenko said. A long position is a bet an asset is going to rise.
Oil, which is trading 12 percent above its average price over the past year, will continue to lure investors to Russia and help boost export revenue into the world’s largest energy exporter, Ponomarenko said. Inflation is also still above target, providing an impetus for Bank Rossii to allow further ruble appreciation, he said.
A strengthening currency reduces prices on imported goods, helping to curb inflation, which was at 14.7 percent in July, compared with the government’s 11.8 percent target. Each one percentage point increase in the ruble to the basket reduces inflation by 0.3 percentage point, according to the central bank’s own calculations.
ING predicts the ruble will advance to around 29 against the basket by year-end. Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment bank, also revised its year-end forecast for the ruble on Thursday to 29, from a previous 29.40.

TITLE: Nuclear Plant For Kaliningrad
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko has signed a decree for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the Kaliningrad region, the country’s atomic energy company announced Wednesday.
Design of the two-reactor plant is to be completed by the end of 2009, and the first of the two 1,200-megawatt reactors is to come on line in 2015, Rosatom said in a statement.
St. Petersburg’s Atomenergoproyekt institute will design the facility, while construction will be carried out by Energoatom at an estimated cost of 5 billion euros ($7.4 billion).
Kaliningrad is not able to meet its own electricity needs and imports 30 percent of its power from a Soviet-era plant in Lithuania, which is scheduled to close next year as one of the conditions set for the country when it gained European Union membership in 2004.
Rosatom spokesman Sergei Novikov said that, aside from meeting the region’s needs, some of the power generated by the plant would be exported, without providing figures.
“We cannot say what the region’s energy needs will be by 2015,” he said. 
Previous efforts to meet the energy shortfall in the region of less than one million people have been unsuccessful.
The Kaliningrad natural gas power plant, completed in 2005, still operates at less than capacity because Gazprom is not supplying it with enough gas.
A second gas plant generator was scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, but construction has been frozen until an agreement with Gazprom can be reached.
It remains unclear how the region will cover the electricity shortfall between the closure of the Lithuanian plant and the opening of the Baltiiskaya unit in 2015.
The decree caught analysts and environmentalists by surprise.
The Kaliningrad plant is not mentioned in the federal plan for the power industry to 2020, developed by the Energy Ministry in 2007.
“Russian nuclear plants always appear in the federal plan first,” said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of Ecodefense, a Kaliningrad-based environmental organization. “The government always makes the decision to build a nuclear plant; this is the first time I’ve seen otherwise.”
Rosatom’s Novikov denied that there was anything untoward, saying the Energy Ministry’s plan was not binding and only intended to provide for “mainland” Russia.
The Kaliningrad region is a western exclave separated from the rest of the country by Lithuania and Poland.
No funding for the project will come from the federal budget, Novikov said.
Foreign investors are expected to cover 49 percent of the cost, he said, with the remainder coming from Rosatom.
Novikov declined to name any prospective investors but said that talks are already under way.
There were some questions about the economic sense of the plan.
“This project seems to have a political, rather than an economic motivation,” said Gennady Sukhanov, an analyst with Troika Dialog.
“Building new capacity of more than 1,000 megawatts is excessive for the Kaliningrad region, but otherwise it would continue to be dependent on European countries,” he said.
In a poll conducted by Kaliningrad sociological center in 2007, 67 percent of respondents were against building a nuclear power plant in the region.

TITLE: Turkish Trucks Held Up As Russia Keeps Eye on Ships
AUTHOR: By Mark Bentley
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is stepping up political and economic pressure on NATO member Turkey as it seeks to prevent U.S. warships from establishing a presence off Georgia’s Black Sea coast.
Turkey controls the Bosporus, the only sea link between the Aegean and Black Seas, meaning it holds sway over which U.S. ships may deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia.
Turkey, an ally of the U.S. that trades more with Russia than any other country, complained this week about Russian curbs on its exports, saying Turkish trucks were being held up at Russian customs posts. The restrictions came as Moscow warned Turkey to stick to a 1936 accord governing the Bosporus, which limits the time ships can spend on the Black Sea.
Turkey is responsible for “monitoring the situation” by making sure warships that arrive in the Black Sea don’t exceed the maximum three-week stay permitted under the accord, Russian deputy military chief Anatoly Nogovitsyn said on the web site of the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday.
The curbs could cost Turkey as much as $3 billion in exports and the Turkish government wants an explanation from Russia, Trade Minister Kursad Tuzmen told reporters on Tuesday.
U.S. warships are spearheading a humanitarian aid mission to Georgia, a U.S. ally that wants to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia began an incursion into its Caucasus neighbor on Aug. 8, a day after Georgian troops attempted to regain parts of Russian-backed South Ossetia.
Russia is “taking measures of precaution” against a U.S. and NATO military build-up in the Black Sea, a spokesman for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday, according to Agence France-Presse. NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero said Thursday the deployments were “routine in nature” and the ships would leave the Black Sea within the 21-day limit, the agency said.
Turkey is responsible for policing the 32-kilometer (20-mile) Bosporus under the Montreux Agreement of July 20, 1936. Countries that don’t border the Black Sea may sail their warships there for a maximum 21 days and must give 15 days’ notice before passing the Bosporus. No such restrictions exist for Russia, which has naval bases on the Black Sea.
USS Taylor, a U.S. frigate, as well as Spanish, German and Polish vessels are conducting exercises in the Black Sea that NATO said were planned more than a year ago.
The Turkish government will “face difficult policy choices in reconciling the country’s Russian and western interests, particularly with regard to the Bosporus and Black Sea, Ian Lesser, a senior fellow at the Washington-based German Marshall Fund, said in an e-mailed note.
Russia was the largest market outside the European Union for Turkish goods last year, with $4.9 billion of exports, according to the Turkish Assembly of Exporters. Turkey sells textiles and food to Russia, and relies on imports of Russian natural gas for heating and electricity.

TITLE: Russia May Cut U.S. Poultry Imports
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia, the biggest importer of U.S. poultry, needs to cut import quotas negotiated in accession talks to the World Trade Organization, said Sergei Lisovsky, deputy chief of the Federation Council’s agrarian policy committee.
Local farmers will produce about 2.2 million tons of poultry, about 600,000 tons more than Russians consume, said Lisovsky, who also sits on the board of the Russian Poultry Union.
Russia, the biggest economy outside the WTO, finished talks with all individual WTO members except Georgia and Ukraine and was negotiating the final agreement with the trade arbiter as a whole when military conflict with Georgia broke out. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza said last Saturday that “WTO members will respond” to the military actions in Georgia.
There is a “crisis of overproduction” of Russian poultry, Lisovsky told reporters in Moscow on Thursday.
Quotas set by the WTO allow Russia to import 1.2 million metric tons of poultry and 493,500 tons of pork this year, according to Renaissance Capital. Some 901,000 tons of poultry import quotas are allocated to the U.S. and 249,500 tons of pork import quotas to the European Union.
Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev said Wednesday that Russia may cut quotas for poultry and pork imports by “hundreds of thousands of tons.” His remarks follow Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s statement that Russia sees “no benefits” from upholding agreements it made as part of its bid to join the WTO.
“All the agrarians have been saying for many years we don’t need the WTO,” Lisovsky said. “A misfortune helped us” get that position heard, he added.
Higher state subsidies for agriculture are needed to help keep consumer prices steady while domestic producers substitute imports with local poultry that currently can’t compete on price, he said.
“The decline in pork and poultry imports from the current 18 percent and 34 percent of total consumption, respectively, will benefit Russian meat producers,” Natasha Zagvozdina, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, wrote in a research note on Thursday. Higher domestic meat production will also trigger additional demand for fodder and grain, which may “support domestic grain prices.”

TITLE: TNK-BP Could Resolve Dispute ‘Within Weeks’
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — BP is conducting secret talks with its Russian billionaire partners in TNK-BP and an outline deal to settle their dispute may come in weeks, a source familiar with the matter said.
Lamar McKay, a top BP troubleshooter brought in to resolve a long-running dispute over strategy and management control at TNK-BP, held a five-hour meeting in London the week before last with Mikhail Fridman, the billionaire oligarch who calls the shots among the Russian shareholders, the source added.
The source said talks were based on the idea that both sides would keep their 50-50 stakes but that any deal would probably give the oligarchs more say in how the company is run.

TITLE: One Way to Save the Relationship
AUTHOR: By Rose Gottemoeller
TEXT: For anyone who cares deeply about U.S.-Russian relations, events in Georgia are as great a tragedy as they are for the inhabitants of the region — the Ossetians, Abkhaz, Georgians and Russians alike. Against the backdrop of this war, the agenda for cooperation with Russia is quickly being thrown into doubt.
Therein the tragedy, because the United States and Russia are major players in the international arena, and so much depends on their ability to work together to solve critical problems. Although tough talk in capitals seems to belie the fact, new models of cooperation — namely, in nonproliferation policy and in the corporate world — had until now brought us far away from the Cold War. 
Now we are facing the fallout from the war in Georgia, and the Cold War analogy is tempting. But we need to take a clear-eyed look at where our interests lie. 
As we sort out the implications of this disaster, safe havens for cooperation still remain. The entire nuclear agenda is in this category, whether we are talking about a potential nuclear weapons program in Iran, the future of nuclear energy, the threat of nuclear terrorism around the world or the necessity of achieving further nuclear reductions in the United States and Russia. 
Moscow and Washington have been working to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, but this process will have to be accelerated if a replacement is to be ready before the treaty expires in December 2009. To ensure that this process continues, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush should drop its long-standing opposition to a routine extension of START for five years. 
According to existing treaty provisions, this decision must be made by this December, before the Bush team leaves office. The extension would in no way hamper the new U.S. administration from moving quickly to a fresh deal with the Russians, but it would ensure that START will not be trapped in the salvo of post-Georgia recriminations.
Nuclear weapons have nearly always been a haven for continued diplomacy, even when U.S.-Russian relations have deteriorated. But what can be done about conventional weapons, which pose the greatest threat to relations between Georgia and Russia?
Once tensions ease between Russia and Georgia, the two sides will presumably return to the negotiating table to try to resolve the problem that sparked the present conflict — the existence of the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At the same time, the broader question of European security arrangements will have to be addressed, but it is not easy to see how. 
No single European institution is perfectly suited to working on this issue. The European Union lacks a seat for the United States, NATO lacks a unified view on its own future, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe does not have Russia as a full member. The Russians, for their part, claim that they have new ideas about how to organize Europe’s security, but their invasion of Georgia doused any spark of interest in hearing them out.
In essence, a new consensus must now be brokered between Russia and its European neighbors, and the United States must have a vital role in the process. Given these requirements, the best choice may be to turn to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, or CFE. The CFE has led to the destruction of thousands of Cold War-era tanks and conventional weapons systems, and today it regulates deployments of conventional weapons in Europe. 
The Russians, it must be said, ceased implementing the agreement one year ago, citing concerns about CFE limits on the Russian armed forces in the flank zones on Europe’s periphery, an action that launched a new negotiation about the treaty’s future. The Russian invasion of Georgia highlights the rationale for flank limits, so the Russians must now be challenged to make their case for changing the CFE treaty. 
CFE is criticized for being overly technical, but perhaps serious technical discussions are a good thing among the parties at this highly charged moment. 
These efforts not will succeed without sustained high-level attention. A risky but potentially big payoff strategy is needed, since political transitions are under way in both Russia and the United States. A bilateral presidential commission formed at the highest levels would be one way to go about it. Its mission would be two-pronged: first, to examine how to get relations back on track between the United States and Russia; and second, to provide high-level counsel to the difficult ongoing negotiations. 
This commission would be of short duration, no more than six months in length. If they could be convinced to serve, the past presidents of the two countries would lend ideal authority to the effort. This group would include former Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on the U.S. side. The problem, of course, would be an unbalanced situation on the Russian side, since former Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin are Russia’s only living past leaders, and Putin is currently serving as prime minister. An answer to this problem may be to invite Putin to serve in ex officio status — he would sustain the heft of the Russian premiership without unbalancing the commission’s deliberations.
Although high-risk, the goal of such a commission would be profound: to salvage the U.S.-Russian relationship so that the two countries can cooperate closely on critical international issues.

Rose Gottemoeller is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: Nation of Champions Starts in the Courtyard
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: With the Olympic Games over, we can now take a look at whether Russia achieved the status of athletic superpower. 
Unfortunately, our athletes did not fulfill the medals quota set by the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Leonid Tyagachyov. Russia’s track and field athletes were the only ones to meet the quota, largely because a modern stadium was built in Irkutsk for them to train in before the games so they could adapt to the Beijing time zone. 
This raises the question of the connection between the country’s third-place finish at the Olympic Games and the low level of support for athletics and fitness among the general population. As before, most bureaucrats who oversee the country’s athletics sector believe that there is almost no connection. They are convinced that the government can create national Olympic champions by recruiting highly paid trainers and by investing a lot of money in a few select athletes and teams. 
This is a flawed approach. Widespread involvement in sports at all levels is the best way to breed future champions. Although the government indeed might be able to find a handful of talented athletes among the few good sports programs scattered around the country, for a better selection, athletic programs need to be instituted nationwide, and they should include a full range of sports. Parents should want to involve their children in them — not because they want them to become future Olympic champions, but because it is a healthy activity in and of itself. 
In Britain, a country with a population less than half that of Russia, you cannot find a school without an diverse sports program that goes far beyond soccer and rugby. 
It is the same in the United States, where sports long ago became an integral part of popular culture. I remember visiting a large sports complex at Ohio State University. It had a stadium comparable in size to Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium. At the university’s numerous athletic facilities, I saw hundreds of students working out on various fitness machines, running on the track, swimming in three different pools, playing tennis on a dozen courts and playing soccer on three separate fields. University sports programs are also ideal breeding grounds for future champions. What’s more, no U.S. tennis champion has ever come to Russia to train, although Russia’s champions often train in the United States.
I was also impressed after my visit to Beijing, where I saw hundreds of thousands of people doing calisthenics in the parks, playing ping-pong or badminton and running. This was the nation’s breeding ground for China’s first-place finish in the Olympics.
In Russia, people who want to play a sport run into huge difficulties because there are so few public athletic facilities available. Although many private health clubs have opened in the last few years, they are hardly affordable to Russia’s middle and lower classes.
As a result, the overwhelming majority of young Russians do not have the athletic opportunities that even the poorest American children enjoy. When Russian teenagers hang out in their courtyards looking for recreation, they are limited for the most part to listening to music, smoking and drinking beer together. They have to look very hard to find even a rundown outdoor basketball court within 2 kilometers of their home. 
As long as this is the situation in courtyards across the country, we will never become a healthy nation — never mind an athletic superpower.

Georgy Bovt is a political analyst and hosts a radio program on City-FM.

TITLE: Cracking up
AUTHOR: By Katya Panfyorova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: “Krakatuk,” a modern circus-style performance of the classic story of the Nutcracker, has returned to the city in which it originated four years after it last wowed audiences here — this time with its own 14,000-square meter purpose-built venue. 

Almost two centuries after E.T.A. Hoffman wrote the tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” and Tchaikovsky penned his popular ballet, “Krakatuk” has reinvented the story and created a new, spectacular genre in doing so. “Krakatuk” — named after the nut in the story — combines circus, theater, animation, eclectic music, audio and visual special effects and abstract modern art forms with ever-changing scenery and decorations to arouse a hurricane of emotions.
“Krakatuk” is an artistic experiment on Hoffman’s original Christmas story, resurrecting its fairy-tale world of toys, dreams, heroes, miracles, and magic with the help of modern technology. 
“The only thing left unchanged will be the old, romantic story,” promises the show’s web site. 
The show’s original concept of a synthesis of styles and modern art is ambitious, but could represent the beginnings of a new genre if a trend for similar shows takes off. The dynamic and dramatic performance is most reminiscent of the Canadian Cirque de Soleil, while the groundbreaking set design and procession of huge coats on hangers are reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s giant inflatable pigs. 
The performance begins with an animation by video artist Alexei Malyshev. A red-haired girl rides a bicycle and a short film sets the scene for the production’s unique atmosphere. 
The show’s powerful music includes a memorable electronic adaptation of Tchaikovsky, created by local DJs Igor Vdovin and Oleg Gitarkin, while the circus elements in the performance include acrobatic tricks, jugglers, human pyramids, dancers, vanishing acts and aerial ballet.
Special effects play a central role in “Krakatuk.” Each scene is startlingly unpredictable, featuring a stunning range of circus skills, music and ballet, complemented perfectly by the lighting, pyrotechnics, multimedia, video effects and foam. The parts of the performance where the artists fly just below the ceiling is particularly impressive.
About 50 actors are involved in the performance, changing into 200 costumes during the spectacle. The wild insect-like monsters, giant rabbits wearing masks, fantastic cyber-mice, and computer-headed being are extremely striking, thanks to the outstanding costumes created by the artist Barmaley (Alexei Bogdanov.) The procession of gigantic coats on hangers is magnificent, even menacing, due to their size. The giant rabbits interact with the public and hold their hands, which is very popular both with children in the audience and with their parents.
The scenery, made up of fine art decorations and modern design solutions, changes constantly, simultaneously before your eyes and yet absolutely invisibly, due to both the mysterious skills of the performers and the amazing audio-visual effects. This cocktail of special effects is interwoven with a love story. The romantic paper ship carrying Masha and the Nutcracker rises triumphantly at the end, before both children and adults get involved in the foam party after the applause. 
The production’s press-attache, Varvara Kalpidi, said that one of the underlining features of the show is its nostalgic and truly Petersburg spirit.
“There’s no glamour — the scenery and costumes look old, like beloved old toys from childhood,” she said. She said that Tchaikovsky’s superb music was the reason the story of the Nutcracker was chosen. The soundtrack is on sale at the show venue.
It took about five-and-a-half years to realize the idea for the circus-theater show after it was originally dreamt up in 1998. Producer Oleg Chesnokov and director Andrei Moguchy invited artist Alexander Shishkin, designer Alexei Bogdanov and creative artists from St. Petersburg’s Pushkinskaya 10 artists’ colony and squats to share their input. 
Chesnokov said that Krakatuk is “a sort of response to the tendency of the virtualization of contemporary life.”
In October 2005, the performance was awarded the Grand Prix of the International Festival of Arts in France and was invited to take part in leading European festivals in Avignon, Hanover and Edinburgh.

<i>Krakatuk runs through September 28 at its own complex near the St. Petersburg Sport and Concert Complex (SKK). M: Park Pobedy. www.krakatuk.ru</i>

TITLE: Word’s worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: <i>Âûâîä / îòâîä âîéñê</i>: troop withdrawal / pullback
Every year as August approaches, I cross my fingers and hope that this month, so cursed for Russia, will pass peacefully without military, economic, social or political disasters. For a few years, August wasn’t too bad. But this year, the curse is back.
To keep my mind off the horror of these particular <i>àâãóñòîâñêèå ñîáûòèÿ</i> (August events), I’ve been concentrating on questions of language. Since I don’t know Georgian, I’ve been reading and re-reading the Russian texts, trying to parse meaning and implication. It’s hard going.
One of the biggest questions concerns the distinction between <i>îòâîä</i> and <i>âûâîä</i> that was made by General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of the General Staff. He was quoted as saying: <i>“Åñòü ïîíÿòèå âûâîäà è îòâîäà ... è ÿ íàäåþñü, ÷òî âû ýòó òîíêîñòü õîðîøî ïîäìåòèëè”</i> (“There is the concept of vyvod and the concept of otvod ... and I hope that you have grasped that subtle distinction”).
That distinction is indeed subtle. Both terms are translated as “withdrawal” or “pull out.” The only inherent distinction that I can discern is this: The prefix <i>îò-</i> is generally used for motion away from something; the prefix <i>âû-</i> is generally used for motion out of something. So <i>îòâîä</i> is “pulling back” from a place and <i>âûâîä</i> is “pulling out” of a place. This seems to be confirmed by what Nogovitsyn added: <i>Ìû íå ïîêèäàåì Þæíóþ Îñåòèþ, à îòâîäèì âîéñêà íà ãðàíèöû å¸ òåððèòîðèè</i> (We aren’t leaving South Ossetia but pulling back our troops to the borders of its territory). 
But I got more confused when I looked at the Russian text of the six-point agreement, which reads, in part: <i>Âîîðóæ¸ííûå Ñèëû Ðîññèéñêîé Ôåäåðàöèè âûâîäÿòñÿ íà ëèíèþ, ïðåäøåñòâóþùóþ íà÷àëó áîåâûõ äåéñòâèé</i> (The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are pulled out to the line they held prior to the start of military operations). Is there a difference between this and what Nogovitsyn said? I don’t know. But then, I don’t have any idea what line Russian troops held before the military operations began. 
I have also been puzzling over the official Russian definition of their military operation: <i>îïåðàöèÿ ïî ïðèíóæäåíèþ ãðóçèíñêèõ âëàñòåé ê ìèðó</i> (literally, operation to compel the Georgian authorities to peace). As far as I can tell, this was coined for these particular events. Call me a cynic, but whenever political leaders come up with a new phrase to describe military actions, I get nervous. I’m not sure how <i>ìèðîòâîð÷åñêèå îïåðàöèè</i> (peacekeeping operations; literally, peacemaking operations) differ from <i>îïåðàöèÿ ïî ïðèíóæäåíèþ ê ìèðó</i> (peace-compelling operation) in theory or practice.

TITLE: A sea serenade
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the brainchild of world-renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and late Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, opened this year’s rendition of the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm. The Aug. 21 performance by the internationally acclaimed orchestra, often regarded as a symbol for the overcoming of political obstacles, was broadcasted live from Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen on the internet.
“Where political discussions fail, music can take over and allow people to meet and forge friendships through the love for music that they share,” said the festival’s co-founder Michael Tyden, general manager of Berwaldhallen, the main host venue of the event.
The festival’s goal stretches far beyond the idea of offering a string of classical concerts. As Tyden puts it, the basis of the Baltic Sea Festival consists of three things: classical music (for inner well-being), environmental issues (for outer well-being) and leadership (for social direction).
The Baltic Sea Festival, established in 2003 by the renowned Finnish conductor and composer, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Mariinsky Theater’s artistic director Valery Gergiev and Berwaldhallen’s Tyden, brings together classical musicians from the region. 
The Mariinsky Theater joins the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir in this year’s event. Gergiev, one of the festival’s organizers, brings to Sweden one of the company’s most recent and most successful productions — a concert performance of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra.”
“It is great to see the Baltic Sea Festival gaining an increasingly high profile regarding its actual social commitment,” Salonen said. “Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are a good example of cultural collaboration in a complicated situation. Much has improved for those of us who live around the Baltic, but there are still political tensions. So you can see the Divan Orchestra as a model of how to work together.”
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which consists of young musicians from Israel, Palestine and various Arab countries across the Middle East, was established in Seville in 2002 and held its first rehearsals in Weimar and Chicago.
“The Middle East conflict is first and foremost a human conflict, rather than a political conflict, as at the heart of it lies a fight between different peoples for the right to live on a certain territory,” Barenboim said before the concert on Aug. 21.
One of the planet’s most polluted seas, the Baltic Sea is also one of the most intensively used ones. Ninety million people inhabit the region.
“The Baltic Sea is the world’s largest brackish sea and a unique ecosystem that is particularly sensitive to pollution,” said Lasse Gustavsson, general secretary of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). “It is therefore particularly important that we create an overall perspective — something that at present is unfortunately lacking.”
The Baltic Sea is badly contaminated with dangerous toxic algae, especially in coastal areas. The Swedish Commission for the Protection of Water Environment warns that the Baltic Sea is in an extremely serious state and that many species in the Baltic’s ecosystem may face extinction because of contamination. 
The number of sightings of fish in the Baltic Sea has decreased by almost a half, while the fish population, plankton and seaweed find themselves at a below-critical survival level due to a shortage of oxygen. 
For various political and economic reasons, not every country in the region is contributing to the ecological revival projects. Russia, responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution, has been slow to actively combat the consequences, while its  citizens show little awareness of environmental issues in general. 
St. Petersburg is contributing to the festival this year with the participation of Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater company. 
The festival highlights the cultural diversity of the region while seeking links with the world of politics. 
“The are so many political structures in Europe at the moment that are more or less artificial, like, for instance, the European Union or NATO,” Salonen said. “The Baltic Sea countries, similar to Mediterranean countries, have a common history and culture, and therefore present a natural unit, rather than one based on artificial political agreements.”

TITLE: An unknown country
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Estonia is a popular tourist destination, but its southern area has only recently opened up for tourism and still remains an unknown territory for many.
The southern regions, with Tartu as the main city, are mostly rural, noted for their rich and largely untouched nature, with lakes small and large, hills, meadows and woods. 

One of the most intriguing attractions is Setumaa, Estonia’s unique historical and ethnic region, located in the Baltic country’s far southeastern corner, where a people named the Setu live.
Bordering with Russia, Setumaa is a mix of traditional Estonian and Russian cultures. 
It is populated by native Setus, who speak their own dialect. Some claim, that it is a fully-fledged language in its own right, though it does borrow heavily from Russian. Setumaa is a divided territory, with a large part of it, including the largest town of Petseri (Pechory in Russian), remaining in Russia when Estonia gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This is in spite of the fact that during Estonia’s first period of independence in 1918-1940, the whole of Setumaa belonged to Estonia.
Setus are famous for their traditional costumes, with massive breastplates decorated with silver coins — a throwback to the Russian tsarist era — and its traditional singing style, the ***leelo*** — a verse sung by a soloist is repeated, polyphonically, by the entire choir several times – no musical accompaniment is provided.
Unlike most Estonians who are Lutherans, the Setu people are Orthodox Christians, having predominantly converted in the 15th century, when a monastery was built in Pechory, now in Russia’s Pskov Oblast. The first Orthodox Christians were reported to have appeared in the area between the 10th and 13th centuries.
Despite this, elements of a more archaic, pre-Christian religion are present, such as Peko, the Setu god of fertility.
Though not yet fully researched, Setumaa’s early history is reported to date back around 8,400 years , to when the first humans populated the area, with the eldest settlement from the Stone Age having recently been discovered in Meremae village. 
The Setu singing and dance tradition is kept up by Kuldatsauk, a female ensemble which dresses in varied traditional clothes and performs the Setu’s authentic multi-voiced runic songs.
Kuldatsauk originally formed in 1988, when Estonia was still under Soviet rule, in the village of Varska. Of its current lineup of 12 members, nine have been with the band since its foundation.
Established in 1998, the Setu Farm Museum in Varska shows the traditional Setu farm, with domestic animals such as horses and goats, as well as warehouses, old tools and handicrafts works. Most of the buildings are original.
Traditional Setu food is served in the traditional wooden Seto Tsaimaja (Setu Tea House), built in  2004. 
Varska also boasts a spa famous for its mud and mineral waters.
In Obinitsa, another Setu village, there is the Seto House Museum, whose collection includes over 20,000 artefacts taken from Setu culture.

The St. Petersburg Times was a guest of the Estonian Tourist Board, Enterprise Estonia (13/15 Liivalaia, 10118 Tallinn, Estonia. Tel: +372 6279 770).

HOW TO GET THERE
Visitors from many countries can enter without a visa, but Russians will need one. If a tour is less than five days long, no invitation is needed; if it is longer a tourist agency can provide one (the list of local agencies dealing with Estonia is available from the Estonian Consulate General in St. Petersburg’s website, www.peterburg.estemb.ru.)
From St. Petersburg, Tartu can be reached, without transfers, on Eurolines buses (www.eurolines.ru), which take about 10 hours (including customs checks). Buses depart from the city’s central long-distance bus station (and can be also caught at the Baltiisky Railway Station a little later) at 11:15 a.m. and 11:35 p.m., arriving in Tartu at 5:50 p.m. and 6:35 a.m. respectively.
The other option is to take the train that now runs at night to Tallinn, from where it takes another 2.5 hours to reach Tartu. The GO Rail train (www.gorail.ee) departs from Vitebsky Railroad Station at 11:25 p.m. and arrives in Tallinn at 6:26 a.m. Note: Starting from Sept. 14, the train will be cancelled. The last departure from Tallinn will be on Sept. 13, and from St. Petersburg, Sept. 14.
You can take a short cut and skip a stop in Tallinn by leaving the bus at Tapa, a small town on the way to the capital, and take a bus or train from there. There is also a diesel train service between Tallinn and Tartu that takes 2 to 3 hours.
There are several daily buses between Tartu and Setumaa’s villages of Varska, Haanja and Obinitsa.

For more information, check out www.visitestonia.com

TITLE: Coming in from the cold
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Walking through Moscow with former counterintelligence agent Oleg Nechiporenko, old conspiracies seem to lurk around every corner.
A bus stop packed with impatient commuters on Novinsky Bulvar is the place where a Soviet double agent sent signals to the U.S. Embassy during the Cold War. A window in a Stalin-era building a few blocks away was cracked open whenever top-secret information was available. 
Doors, gates, buildings — everything reminds Nechiporenko of a time when the KGB had its agents uncovering foreign spies in Moscow and traveling the world for information to help the socialist cause.
Nechiporenko, once described by the CIA as the best KGB agent in Latin America, served for about 40 years in the KGB’s counterintelligence department. Under the guise of a staffer at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico, he helped Fidel Castro set up Cuba’s secret services. He saw Lee Harvey Oswald at the embassy a few months before U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. When an apparent CIA frame-up led to his expulsion from Mexico, he became a globetrotting KGB agent straight out of the pages of a James Bond novel.
But the silver-haired Nechiporenko, now 76, dismisses the notion that the story of his life is akin to a spy thriller, calling the work of a spy “a routine job.” 
“The life of an agent differs very much from what you see in films and television,” he said during a recent three-hour interview at a cafe in central Moscow. “Most operations are done thanks to intellectual work.” He paused. “But it is creative work.”
The KGB stationed Nechiporenko in Mexico City for two stints, from 1961 to 1965 and from 1967 to 1971, posing as a Soviet Embassy employee. His mission during these years included helping the young communist state of Cuba organize its secret services to counter the United States.
“The Cubans were good students. I shared my experience with them to help them fight against what at the time was our common enemy — the U.S. secret services,” Nechiporenko said.
“They would listen with attention, and they learned what we had to teach. Furthermore, they tailored what they had learned to the needs of their country, and they achieved excellent results in the fight against the enemy.”
Nechiporenko said the Cuban secret service became so professional that in the early 1980s its members helped him train recruits for the secret service of the new Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Nechiporenko characterized the work of organizing a secret service as “simple.”
“You teach them how to analyze the events and the actions of the enemy. We also shared information that we had about the enemy,” he said. 
In 1978, Nechiporenko witnessed first hand the fruits of his labor in Cuba when Havana hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. More than 18,000 people from 145 countries attended the festival, organized under the banner “For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship.” The Cuban secret services provided security for the visitors.
“They become so professional that they organized operations that were able to neutralize American military operations against the Cuban government. The Cubans counted 34 times that the Americans had tried to kill Castro,” Nechiporenko said.
Nechiporenko said he did not know Castro personally but had sat on the same podium with him and listened to his trademark hours-long speeches several times. One such occasion was in Havana’s Jose Marti Square during the youth festival.
“During the festival, I sat next to him on the podium. When the representative from Vietnam took the floor, Castro took notes. When his turn to speak arrived, he took off his bulletproof jacket, put his notebook aside and started to speak. He wore only a T-shirt. His long speech was held under the hot Caribbean sun, but people listened like they were hypnotized. They would not leave,” Nechiporenko said.
He said CIA defector Philip Agee condemned the CIA’s operations during the festival in his 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary.”  
Nechiporenko said he first met Agee in Mexico in 1968, when Agee was working undercover as part of the U.S. delegation to the Mexico City Olympics, and Agee was not the only double agent on the U.S. government payroll at the time.
“Besides Agee, there were Cuban double agents who pretended to work for the Americans,” he said. “They did an excellent job. One of them showed us a watch that he got from Henry Kissinger for his good fight against Castro.”
When Nechiporenko first moved to Mexico in the early 1960s, tensions between the United States and the new Castro government made times rough for KGB agents in Latin America, he said. “It was a really tough time for the [KGB] residents in Mexico. We were in the center of the United States-Moscow-Cuba triangle, since Mexico was the only channel between Cuba and the rest of the world. There were two flights a week to and from Cuba,” Nechiporenko said.
“It was the hardest time of the Cold War. A nuclear conflict could have begun. Everyone was relieved when it was over.”
At the time, Mexico was a key posting for Soviet agents, Nechiporenko said. From there, they could get information on Cuban counterrevolutionaries who were operating in Central America and the United States.
On Nov. 22, 1963, Nechiporenko was at work in the Soviet Embassy when he heard a woman screaming at the gates. “They killed the president,” she said in Spanish, Nechiporenko recalled.
He turned on the radio in his office and learned that Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. When he turned on the television, he was surprised to see the footage of the accused killer. Only two months before, Oswald had visited the embassy in Mexico City to request a visa to enter the Soviet Union.
“We were shocked to see him,” Nechiporenko said.
“Oswald behaved in a very strange way during his visit to the embassy. He took a revolver out and said he was ready to use it if anyone tried to make an attempt on his life. 
“He didn’t threaten anyone, but we had the impression that he was an unstable person — neurotic, but not crazy.”
Nechiporenko wrote about the incident in his book “Passport to Assassination,” which was published in the United States on the 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s death in 1993.
“For years I gathered information about Oswald, and I wrote the book after perestroika,” Nechiporenko said. The book was later translated into Russian and Spanish.
When Nechiporenko presented the book in Dallas, he sat next to U.S. military intelligence agents who had worked in Mexico at the same time as him.
“I said in my speech that I never would have dreamed of sitting next to such people just 10 years earlier,” he said.
Nechiporenko was expelled from Mexico in 1971 after being accused of trying to organize a communist coup, an allegation he said was planted by CIA agents.
His suspicions have been confirmed by Joseph Burkholder Smith, a former CIA agent assigned to Mexico in 1969. Smith wrote in his book “Portrait of a Cold Warrior: Second Thoughts of a Top CIA Agent” that the CIA, after unsuccessfully trying to recruit Nechiporenko, got him expelled through another Soviet Embassy employee, Raya Kiselnikova and a fabricated story that he was the main instigator of a Mexican student revolt in 1968.
“The CIA put information into Kiselnikova’s mouth,” Nechiporenko said. “I was presented as an agent who picked students to study in Moscow, where they trained as extremists. The idea was that these students would then return home and organize socialist revolutionary movements.”
Kiselnikova, who defected in Mexico, told reporters on March 4, 1971, that Nechiporenko was a KGB agent. 
Along with three other Soviet diplomats, Nechiporenko was expelled from Mexico on charges of plotting to overthrow the government.
“After that, I became a spy by request,” Nechiporenko said. “I traveled to countries where an agent was needed. Sometimes I needed to change my appearance and passport. I worked with the secret services of friendly countries and took part in different operations organized by our services.”
Looking back at his storied career, Nechiporenko said every person is born with a genetic code, and “ while the person is growing there is a fight among some genes to dominate others.”
“When I analyze my life,” he said, “I see that the conspiracy genes have won the fight.”

TITLE: A helping hand
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A newcomer to the local travel guide scene aims to catalog local attractions in more detail than most in order to help foreign tourists make the most of their time in the city. Saint Petersburg Travel Pages is a quarterly travel directory whose first edition came out in March. With a circulation of 7,000 volumes, the publication includes information on more than 120 museums and other tourist attractions, about 1,000 travel agencies, 380 hotels, 80 out-of-town destinations, 50 airlines, 30 cruise companies, 48 restaurants, 20 clubs and other useful information for tourists.  
Having been launched within City Hall’s “Development program of St. Petersburg as a tourist center from 2005-2010” (also known as the 5:5:5 program), it aims to provide information on and advertisements for tourist attractions. The 5:5:5 program aims to make St. Petersburg one of the top five most popular tourist destinations in Europe during the next five years, attracting five million tourists per year.
Besides Russia, Saint Petersburg Travel Pages has been presented at tourism fairs in France, Japan, the U.S., Greece, the U.K. and Spain. It is also distributed at the city’s tourist information centers, and at meetings and events organized by St. Petersburg’s external relations committee.
Targeted mainly at foreign tourists, the directory is mostly in English, but some of the features on culture and history are printed in both Russian and English.  
“We think that St. Petersburg, as the city which is known as the cultural capital of Russia and Europe, deserves to have a quality informational publication that is not only attractive and easy to use, but also includes a large database of the tourism market,” said Alevtina Telysheva, editor of Saint Petersburg Travel Pages. 
“We try to make our publication of a high standard. Although the process of making it perfect can be endless, I believe our travel directory can significantly contribute to the improvement of the city’s image, help to attract more tourists to St. Petersburg, and prove useful for those wishing to visit the city. It can be seen as a kind of contribution to the 5:5:5 program.”
One of the main parts of Saint Petersburg Travel Pages is the listings section of the city’s museums. Although there are more than 170 museums in St. Petersburg, there is no separate publication dedicated to the museums of St. Petersburg. Before the end of the year, Saint Petersburg Travel Pages is going to cover up to 100 of the city’s museums. 
“It is obvious that there are very rich and world-famous museums that just don’t need more advertising. However, there are still plenty of small but very interesting museums that should also stay open and can manage to survive with enough publicity,” said Telysheva. 
Although Saint Petersburg Travel Pages does not charge museums, theaters and churches for inclusion in the publication, Telysheva says that sometimes it is difficult to even obtain a good quality photograph from them. 
“Many museums just don’t have quality photos, and we are often asked to take or find photos ourselves,” said Telysheva. 
The members of the Saint Petersburg Travel Pages editorial team are currently working on an online version of the directory due to be launched this fall.

TITLE: Salon
TEXT: A Russian tradition, established long ago was sending Russian masters of art abroad, especially to Italy, to absorb the treasures of Europe’s civilization.
By Victor Sonkin
It is a long and venerable tradition of Russian literature that doctors love literature, many of them to the point of becoming writers themselves. The archetypal example was set by Anton Chekhov, but there have been plenty of doctor writers ever since, from Mikhail Bulgakov to Vassily Aksyonov, all first-rate stars on the literary horizon.
Another Russian tradition, established as long ago as the times of Peter the Great, was sending Russian masters of art abroad, especially to Italy, to absorb the treasures of Europe’s civilization. The effort was mostly centered on painters and sculptors, but authors soon warmed to the idea as well: Nikolai Gogol lived in Rome for many years.
A recent event indicated the confluence of these two traditions. The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund has announced that its new fellow for 2008 will be Boris Khersonsky.
Khersonsky, 58, lives in Odessa in Ukraine and writes poetry and essays in Russian. He is a psychiatrist with several decades of active practice behind him and is currently the chair of the Department of Clinical Psychology of Odessa National University. His insightful poems have been printed by many publications in Russia and received wide critical acclaim. Of special interest was his 2006 collection, published by New Literary Review in its series “Poetry of the Russian Diaspora.” The collection was titled “Family Archive” and included reworked scenes from the lives, memoirs and letters of numerous people from Lviv and Odessa to Brooklyn, and the plight of the Jewish people and their Soviet neighbors in the 20th century. Khersonsky’s poetry brings a streak of psychoanalysis into verse, combined with a sense of God’s presence in the world.
A year before his death, the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky wrote a letter to the mayor of Rome asking for the establishing of a Russian Academy in Rome to mend the severed line of cultural exchange between Europe and Russia. His friends fulfilled his dream, at least in part, by establishing a fellowship that allows authors writing in Russian, irrespective of their nationality, to live in Rome and Venice for a few months. “Italy was a revelation to the Russians,” Brodsky wrote, “now it can become the source of their renaissance.”
With the relations between Russia and the West at a low point, it is vital that politicians refrain from transferring these tensions to everyday life. It is especially vital that all cultural ties remain strong and, if possible, grow even stronger. The Joseph Brodsky fellowship serves exactly this purpose.

TITLE: Going native
AUTHOR: By Virginia Rounding
TEXT: “Wilhelm von Habsburg, the Red Prince, wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a saber, a pistol, a rudder or a golf club; he handled women by necessity and men for pleasure.” 
These two sentences, from the Prologue of Timothy Snyder’s “The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke” and used in the book’s promotional material, might lead one to expect the sort of biography commonly described as a “romp.” But such an expectation would be misplaced. Snyder, a professor at Yale University, is a serious historian, and it is not his intention to titillate his readers.
Wilhelm von Habsburg (“saved from oblivion,” notes the author, “by a few devoted Ukrainian historians and monarchists”) represents a convenient peg on which Snyder hangs his real concerns and interests. These focus on the nature of nationality — whether it must always be given or can be chosen — and of perceptions of time. Specifically, Snyder is interested in how the Habsburg monarchy approached those issues and the extent to which that approach is mirrored in 21st-century solutions to the questions of nationhood that preoccupy the countries of the European Union and those who seek to join it.
The author gives each of his chapter headings a color — Gold, Blue, Green, Red, Grey, White, Lilac, Brown, Black and Orange — with each color relating to a particular phase of his protagonist’s life or, at the end, to events after his death. “Blue” is subtitled “Childhood at Sea,” “White” is attached to “Agent of Imperialism,” and so on. No chapter is entitled “Purple,” but in places the prose makes up for this omission. Here is Snyder getting quite carried away with his color scheme: “Wilhelm had lost the easy assurance that time was an eternity of royal blue — or at least a green maturation to power, or a bloody red march to victory. He had learned to think instrumentally and had become an instrument. His only success was to strengthen the white politics of the moment, a European counterrevolution that was already turning brown at the edges.” 
Wilhelm was born in 1895. His father, Stefan, was a grandson of Archduke Karl von Habsburg, who defeated Napoleon at Aspern, and his mother was Archduchess Maria Theresia von Habsburg, a Tuscan princess. One of her grandfathers was Leopold II von Habsburg, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, while the other was Ferdinand II of Bourbon. She was also the great-granddaughter of Stefan’s grandfather Karl, thus her husband’s first cousin once removed.
Stefan was preoccupied all his life with “the Polish question” — that is, whether the three partitions of old Poland would ever be reunited and, if so, what form the united country would take. His solution, at least during Wilhelm’s childhood and adolescence, was that Wilhelm, his youngest son, should be regent of a Poland that would be part of the Habsburg crownlands. But Wilhelm gave his heart to another country and decided to make of himself a Ukrainian. 
During World War I, the young Wilhelm commanded a platoon within a predominantly Ukrainian regiment. His ambitions to be ruler of a Habsburg Ukraine seemed to take a step toward realization after the death of the Emperor Franz Josef in 1916, when the new Emperor, Karl, began to evince a particular interest in both Wilhelm and the Ukrainian national question. But by the end of 1918 ,the Habsburg monarchy had ceased to exist. On the day the German Kaiser signed the armistice bringing the war to a close, Karl withdrew from affairs of state and retired to a hunting lodge. 
Wilhelm took refuge in a monastery — but not for long, as perhaps his greatest strength was an ability to bend with the wind and adapt to changing circumstances. So when the Ukrainian National Republic was formed, he managed to get himself made chief of foreign relations for the Army. Two months later he resigned, dismayed by the accommodations Ukraine was making with Poland in a desperate attempt to resist Russia’s Red and White Armies.
By the summer of 1920, Wilhelm was in Vienna, now permanently estranged from his father. He became involved in a deluded plot to invade Bolshevik Russia and at the end of 1922 was once more on the move, this time headed for Madrid. Here he attempted to become a businessman, getting involved in arms deals, but he had few talents in this direction, his only business assets, according to Snyder, being “his good looks, dress sense and last name.” 
In addition to his business interests, Wilhelm maintained unusual relations with a number of men. He needed both a father figure to replace the real father against whom he had rebelled and men of a lower social class to cater to his sexual desires. For some years his personal secretary and his valet fulfilled this latter requirement, but he was also a frequenter of Parisian male brothels. Despite these proclivities, Wilhelm was also able to seduce women just by looking at them. Well, some women, perhaps.
The opportunistic element in Wilhelm’s character, allied to the cause of bringing about Ukrainian nationhood, led him to sympathize with the Nazis and even to join the German army at the start of World War II — for at the time the “Nazis seemed like the only possible ally of Ukraine and the only force that might once again propel Wilhelm toward a throne.” But then he switched sides when that particular calculation proved incorrect. The slaughter of 30,000 Kievan Jews at Baby Yar may have helped him realize that Nazi Germany was no friend of Ukraine, and he now went some way toward redeeming himself by engaging in anti-Nazi espionage. 
After the war, he became once more the pragmatist, and made a virtue out of necessity: “Wilhelm, a man of royal birth and aspirations, decided to support the rule of the people. ... He endorsed the Austrian republic after a career as a monarchist, accepted the Austrian nation after a lifetime of believing in empire, and even joined the People’s Party after years of bemoaning democracy as a front for Soviet conspiracy.” 
In the end, it was the Soviet Union that did for him. He was arrested as a spy in 1947 and finally made it to Kiev, “the city of his dreams, wearing a blindfold instead of a crown, borne to a dungeon rather than a throne.” Sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment on Aug. 12, 1948, he died of tuberculosis six days later.
Despite the undeniably dramatic nature of Wilhelm’s life, Snyder never succeeds in bringing him to life. This is largely because the details of that life are of secondary importance to the author, whose real hero is Ukraine. And one cannot help but admire that country and the dogged determination of its inhabitants, and to rejoice that it has at last attained the destiny the so-called Red Prince desired for it — independent nationhood within a wider Europe.
Virginia Rounding is the author, most recently, of “Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power.”

TITLE: Covering a classic
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Despite the fact Alina Simone’s album “Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware” is not written by her, nor is it sung in English, the U.S. singer/songwriter of Russian origin has received positive reviews in top U.S. publications, including the New Yorker. 
Released earlier this month, the album is a collection of songs by the late Siberian folk-punk legend Yanka. whose music Simone first heard on a tape given to her by a Russian street musician in Brighton Beach, New York’s Russian enclave.
“Never did I expect such a response,” Simone said in a recent e-mail interview. “I thought I was veering away from the world of indie-pop to do, essentially, an art project. Instead the mainstream press is embracing it.”
Simone was taken to the United States when she was one in 1975. Her parents left Kharkov in the former Soviet Union as political refugees. Now Brooklyn-based, Simone has taken a break from releasing her own English-language songs, such as those on her 2007 debut album “Placelessness,” to perform and record a selection of songs written by Yanka. 
Singer and songwriter Yanka (Yana Dyagileva) was born in Novosibirsk and became popular in the Soviet underground music scene in the late 1980s. She played underground concerts and distributed her songs on home-produced tapes. Tragically, Yanka died in May 1991, aged 24, and never saw her music released commercially in her lifetime.
“Yanka’s music is incredibly compelling,” Simone said. “It has an intense kind of intimacy and immediacy because the music is so raw and heartfelt. Personally, I think it is difficult not to become interested in Yanka’s music once you’ve heard it. And her life, which was in equal measures heroic and tragic, gives the listener all the more reason to pay attention.”
Some of the songs that Yanka originally performed, backed by acoustic guitar or sometimes by a punk band with distorted guitars, have been rearranged on Simone’s album.
“In some cases I added very little, singing the songs live and solo as Yanka did. But many of the songs have been slowed down or sped up and fleshed out with lush arrangements and instrumentation that includes trumpet, cello, bajo sexto and electric 12-string guitar.”
Last year, Simone gave Russian audiences a taste of her Yanka covers by doing a small tour with performances in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Archangelsk.
“I felt it would be wrong or simply cowardly to avoid the criticism of those who best understand Yanka’s music and the context in which it was made,” she said. Although media reviews were largely favorable, she admitted some opposition from die-hard Yanka fans.
“There are obviously many Yanka fans who feel that to touch her songs is practically blasphemous,” she said. On the other hand, there are fans who thought Simone changed the songs too radically.
“There are also Russians who are unhappy about my singing Yanka’s songs with my American accent. But being who I am, I could never satisfy these listeners. I think some dissent and friction is actually a good thing. Art should be a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper.”
In the United States, singing in Russian proved not to be an obstacle for either critics or listeners, Simone said.
“It has only helped attract interest, even in very unlikely places,” she said. “Howard Wolfson, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, wrote to me to personally order a copy of my solo demo versions of the Yanka cover album.” 
Simone is planning to continue performing Yanka cover material in the next three months, and her next album of original material is already about 80 percent recorded.
“It is drastically different from both the Yanka album and my previous work, featuring Brazilian drumming, Cuban-style trumpet, vocal loops and more ambitious arrangements,” she said.
“Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware” is out on 54 40’ or Fight!

TITLE: The real deal
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ruan Tai // 59/92 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa // Tel: 666 6666, 640 1330 // Open daily from midday until 2 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Lunch for two without alcohol 2,400 rubles ($100)
Among St. Petersburg’s restaurants featuring ethnic cuisines, there’s fierce competition to create the most “authentic” eatery.  This can be quite comical at upmarket restaurant openings, where the PR agents will proudly claim that the sushi chefs have been shipped in en masse from the land of the rising sun. Chatting to them shortly afterwards you soon discover that they’re of Uzbek descent and have actually only been shipped in from as far afield as Prospekt Prosveshenia.
Ruan Tai, a new Thai restaurant on the corner of Gorokhaya Ulitsa and the Fontanka River, appears to be playing it by the book, however — the name even translates as “Thai Restaurant” — and the chefs have impressive resumes to back up their claims to Thai origins. Chalerm Rabibabadi, we’re told, worked at the Peninsula Bangkok and London’s Nahm (blessed with a Michelin star), while Kkhiaokram Aiek (apologies for the spelling) worked at the royal residence in Bangkok and the five-star Shangri-La and Mandarin Oriental hotels. In fact, the restaurant, part of the Triton group, sent its culinary director on a three-month field research and recruitment campaign. Which, of course, beats driving a minibus up to Prospekt Prosveshenia, loading it up with anyone vaguely oriental looking and then plonking chefs hats on them.   
Despite the imported staff, Ruan Tai doesn’t fall into the trap of taking its exotic roots to absurd extremes for mere novelty value. The restaurant’s philosophy appears to be keep it simple, keep it reasonably priced, and keep the customers coming back. Instead of a fifty page menu featuring stewed snake bladder or pickled monkey penis at vastly inflated prices, there about 120 items to choose from, with main courses running around the 500 rubles mark ($20). For convenience, the menu is also divided up into the four elements — Water (fish), Air (poultry), Earth (meat) and Fire (grilled). 
The play-it-straight philosophy can also be seen in the decor. There are three rooms — smoking, non-smoking and VIP — seating around 70, with carved wood furniture, ornate arches, murals on the walls, Buddha statues and gold and light brown tones throughout. All very tasteful, but nothing too gaudy. 
We started with a Tom Ka Khed soup from the vegetarian menu — based on fried coconut, it was rich and creamy with firm mushrooms, piquant rather than tear-your-head-off spicy (290 rubles, $12).
The duck spring rolls (290 rubles, $12) were perfectly crisp, tender on the inside, and came with a selection of sauces — another element in the restaurant’s philosophy, designed to prevent the locals being put off oriental cuisine’s reputation for spiciness, is to provide excellent sauces so that you yourself can control the heat.
My vegetarian dining partner then went for the Tau Khu Sam Rod, marinated tofu with crushed chili peppers (290 rubles, $12) — again, not too spicy, the sauce perfectly complimenting the fresh vegetables that went into the mix. The only concern was that, following the above-mentioned rich coconut soup, my dining partner was struggling with the abundance of the dish. 
The duck with minced tiger prawns (490 rubles, $20) was excellently presented and rich in taste.
For dessert, the selection of sorbets came presented in half a coconut shell (390 rubles, $16), each steeped in its own fruity taste rather than being a hodgepodge of generic freezer selections.  
The mini-bananas fried in a fruit batter with sesame seeds (240 rubles, $10) — the batter could have been crisper, but that may have been a matter of personal taste.
The new opening that is Ruan Tai, then, has much to offer. And there are more reasons to be cheerful on the way — the good people behind at Ruan Tai are nearing the completion of a similarly authentic Chinese restaurant at the same address.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: I’m still of two minds about whether to stump up for a toaster for pop diva Alla Pugachyova and her toy boy, television host Maxim Galkin. This month, the tabloids have revived the long-standing rumor that they plan to tie the knot, and Zhizn even gave us details of a huge designer bed that Allochka has picked out for Galkin’s castle. It all sounds very romantic, but then again they do have a new talk show to promote. 
Pugachyova has been constantly photographed with Galkin ever since they met at a song competition in 2001. She introduced him to society, changed his hair and encouraged him to inflict his crooning on the nation. Once a comedian noted for his impressions, he now co-hosts a celebrity karaoke contest with Alla, who sings a duet with him at the beginning of each show. The pair has been romantically linked since Pugachyova announced her divorce from her latest husband, pop star Filipp Kirkorov, despite a difference in age of 27 years.
This month, Zhizn got all excited, even asking a registry office worker if Galkin could change his surname to Pugachyov if they got married. (He could.) It also revealed that Galkin is putting the final touches to his chateau in the Moscow region — a vision in pink stone and wrought iron — and Alla has picked out a bed for the master bedroom. The Italian-made model is “in the style of a French boudoir” and will be trimmed with Versace fabric. All together, the furnishings of the bedroom will cost more than $60,000.
Pugachyova and Galkin have never said officially that they are a couple or that they are getting married. But they haven’t exactly denied it either. As Komsomolskaya Pravda pointed out, they earn 100,000 euros for hosting corporate parties together, so there’s not much incentive to spoil the fun. On their television show, they exchange coy hints, and they recently stoked the fire by dressing up as a bride and groom for a sketch at a Latvian song festival. Alla even threw a bouquet. 
There will be more opportunity to watch the body language in the autumn, when Pugachyova and Galkin will present a new talk show on Channel One, Tvoi Den reported on Thursday. Perhaps they’d better not invite the ex-husband, Kirkorov, who still refuses to take off his wedding ring. Although I expect they will.
The wedding mysteries don’t end there. Tvoi Den is convinced that Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend, Darya Zhukova, got engaged on Darya’s 25th birthday in June. But then again, The New York Times wrote this week that she is 27, so I’m not sure how far you can trust that information.
Tvoi Den even described the proposal. “They didn’t go somewhere alone, they didn’t hide. They discussed the forthcoming wedding right here at a table near the bar,” said an unnamed witness, who may or may not be a barman at the nightclub where Zhukova celebrated her birthday. He quoted Zhukova as saying, “Yes, of course I’ll marry you. I consent.” 
Tvoi Den has lots more detail on the supposed wedding. Amy Winehouse is due to sing — as she did at the opening of Zhukova’s new gallery on Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa — and the bride has commissioned a dress from Roberto Cavalli for 250,000 euros. It says there will be a series of six ceremonies, starting with a small one for 100 people in Moscow at the end of October, followed by parties in the Maldives and Los Angeles and ending with a bash in London. 
The invitations will be sent out in early September, Tvoi Den promises. So at least this is one wedding rumor that can’t run and run.

TITLE: Bill Clinton Adds Support as Obama Makes History
AUTHOR: By Kristin Jensen and Catherine Dodge
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: DENVER — Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday night erased any doubt about his support for Barack Obama, as he argued that Republican candidate John McCain is on the wrong side of the “great questions” in the November election.
McCain is a “good man” who served heroically in the Vietnam War, Clinton said Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention. “But on the two great questions of this election — how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America’s leadership in the world — he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.”
Clinton used his speech, one of the most closely watched at the Democrats’ national convention, to quell talk that he wasn’t fully behind Obama’s presidential bid and to reach out to the 18 million people who voted in the primaries for his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama,” Clinton, 62, told delegates to the Denver convention, referring to the previous evening’s speech by his wife. “That makes two of us.”
Obama, 47, formally became the party’s standard-bearer just hours earlier, after Hillary Clinton halted a roll-call vote and called for his nomination by acclamation. Her name had also been placed in nomination as a gesture to her supporters.
For the second night in a row, the Clintons dominated the program with rousing speeches in support of their former rival. The Democrats also nominated Delaware Senator Joseph Biden as their vice presidential candidate last night. In a speech to the convention, Biden said he and Obama are ready to lead the U.S.
“I watched how Barack touched people, how he inspired them, and I realized he had tapped into the oldest belief in America: we don’t have to accept a situation we cannot bear,” said Biden, 65. “We have the power to change it.”
Obama, the first black presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party, briefly appeared on stage after Biden spoke, saying they are on a journey “to take America back.” Obama was due to deliver his own acceptance speech Thursday night before 75,000 supporters in Denver’s Invesco Field football stadium.
Obama told the crowd on Wednesday night that he wanted to move the convention to a larger venue this evening so more people could participate in a campaign that he said was based on the idea that “change starts from the bottom up.”
The moment of Obama’s nomination was freighted with history. It came on the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Lyndon Johnson, who broke with fellow southern Democrats to dramatically expand the civil rights of blacks, actions that led to the end of segregation. And it came on the eve of the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech on the National Mall in Washington.
Debi Rose, 57, a delegate from Staten Island, New York, said the moment changed her outlook on the country.
“We come to a place in history that I never really thought I would see,” Rose, who is black, said. “It really is a fulfillment of a dream of Dr. King’s prediction that we would get to the mountaintop.”
Speakers last night, including former President Clinton, spent more time attacking McCain and the Republican Party than on the previous two evenings. Clinton said Obama would work to build foreign alliances and create new jobs at home, reversing the course taken by Republican President George W. Bush.
“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” Clinton said, bringing delegates to their feet.
Obama “is ready to lead,” Clinton said. “Everything I learned in my eight years as president and in the work I’ve done since, in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job.”
Bill Clinton was just 46 when he won the presidency in 1992. Last night, he reminded the crowd that during the campaign he was derided as “too young and too inexperienced” to be the nation’s commander-in-chief.
“It didn’t work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history,” Clinton said. “And it won’t work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.”

TITLE: Kuznetsova, Jankovic Struggle Through in U.S. Open
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Second seed Jelena Jankovic and former champion Svetlana Kuznetsova from St. Petersburg had to work much harder than expected to shake off their opponents in the second round of the U.S. Open on Wednesday.
Serb Jankovic squandered a match point in the second set before scraping past Swede Sofia Arvidsson 6-3 6-7 7-5 and Russian Kuznetsova overcame a slow start to beat Romanian teenager Sorana Cirstea 7-6 6-1.
Olympic champion Elena Dementieva, however, had no complaints about not playing to her potential after completing a 6-2 6-1 demolition of Pauline Parmentier of France.
Jankovic, who reached the last four at the U.S. Open in 2006, needed two hours and 45 minutes to subdue the 63rd-ranked Arvidsson on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court.
The 23-year-old Serb twice served for the match in the second set and also led 3-0 in the tiebreak before the Swede pegged her back with a series of stinging groundstrokes.
Jankovic, who briefly claimed top spot in the rankings earlier this month, had to hold off another Arvidsson comeback in the decider before booking her place in the third round.
“It was a really tough one and I am completely out of breath,” said a relieved Jankovic who will next face Wimbledon semi-finalist Zheng Jie. “I struggled out there and my opponent played really, really well and pushed me to the limit.
“I am not yet at my full potential. I still have a long way to go to be where I want to be.”
Kuznetsova, who clinched the 2004 title in an all-Russian final with Dementieva, trailed world number 53 Cirstea 4-2 in the opening set before raising the level of her own game.
“Today I played much better than my first match, so it’s looking good for me,” the third seed said after setting up a meeting with 28th-seeded Slovenian Katarina Srebotnik.
“Definitely I’m not in my best shape now and I haven’t been playing well before the U.S. Open. But grand slams keep me much more motivated and I do much more better in grand slams.”
Eighth-seeded Vera Zvonareva became the latest casualty at Flushing Meadows, losing 6-3 6-3 to Tatiana Perebiynis of Ukraine, while 1998 champion Lindsay Davenport needed to rely on her greater wealth of experience to steer past Russian teenager Alisa Kleybanova 7-5 6-3.
Serbian third seed Novak Djokovic, beaten in last year’s final by Roger Federer, survived an injury scare before beating Frenchman Arnaud Clement 6-3 6-3 6-4 in the first round of the men’s event.
The Australian Open champion appeared to turn his left ankle midway through the third set but recovered to wrap up victory in just under two hours.
“It’s okay,” Djokovic said of his foot. “It’s going to be good in two days, I’m sure. I was thinking more of it than I was actually feeling the pain, so it’s not really a big deal.
“In that certain moment, I felt big pain so I just had to tape the ankle. But it’s going to be all right.”
Fifth-seeded Russian Nikolay Davydenko made even smoother progress, charging into the second round with a comfortable 6-3 6-3 6-3 win over Israel’s Dudi Sela.
The Russian has not won back-to-back matches since winning a low-key claycourt tournament in Warsaw in June but appeared to have regained his form to dispatch Sela.
In the final match of the night session, big-serving local favorite Andy Roddick, the 2003 champion, powered down 15 aces to ease past Frenchman Fabrice Santoro 6-2 6-2 6-2.
“I was really excited about the way I was playing and glad with the way I served because I haven’t been serving that well,” the eighth-seeded American said. “If I can do that, I like my chances of holding which puts pressure on the other guy.”

TITLE: Merriman to Play, Despite Injuries
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN DIEGO —The surgeon’s knife can wait. Shawne Merriman is going to play football, two torn knee ligaments and all.
A day after visiting a fourth doctor, the San Diego Chargers’ star outside linebacker decided Wednesday to play this season rather than have his damaged left knee repaired now.
“To be as simple as possible, I just want to play football,” Merriman said. “That’s what it comes down to. I know what’s on the table, I know what’s on the line. I put a lot of work in this and I want to play.”
Merriman said late last week that he has tears in both the posterior cruciate and lateral collateral ligaments in his left knee, which he hurt in a game at Tennessee in December. He spent several days seeking outside opinions. He returned Tuesday after seeing a doctor in Miami.
Merriman said all four doctors he saw said he needed surgery, but there “just wasn’t a time frame on that. My knee still looks pretty good. The decision was left up to me to play. If you give a football player a decision to play, you know, I’m going to play.”
When he does have surgery, he’ll be looking at a rehab of six to seven months.
“I’ll have the surgery at any point,” he said. “Nobody knows. I kind of left it on the table when to have it. Not even doctors can tell me that.”
While denying reports the situation could be career-threatening, he pledged to be “the same old Shawne Merriman. That’s what I’m hoping.”
With his nonstop energy and spasmodic sack dance, the player known as “Lights Out” has been the face of the Chargers’ defense the past three seasons. He has 39 1/2 sacks in that span, more than any other NFL player. He’s played in three straight Pro Bowls.
Right or wrong, Merriman’s decision was big for a team that has Super Bowl expectations.
Star running back LaDainian Tomlinson, knocked out of last season’s AFC championship game after aggravating a knee injury, was happy to hear Merriman will play.
“How do you tell a warrior to sit down? That’s what he is, a warrior. He’s trained for this. It’s hard to tell a guy to sit down,” Tomlinson said.
“Obviously it was a big relief for a lot of us. We all know what Shawne brings to this team, especially the defense,” the running back added. “He’s an impact player, a difference-maker. You just kept your fingers crossed that he was going to be able to play. But I think in the back of all our minds, knowing Shawne, we know what was in his heart and that he really wanted to play, and that any cost possible he was going to find a way to get out there on that field.”
As he was seeking medical advice, Merriman said he was also talking with teammates, family members and friends, as well as coaches with the Chargers and from high school and college.
“But they all know me,” he said. “It’s not a decision of anything else but me wanting to play football, and whether that’s a good decision or not, I’m going to go out and try first to see what I want to do.”

TITLE: Thai Protesters Show No Signs of Giving Up
AUTHOR: By Rattaphol Onsanit and Daniel Ten Kate
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: BANGKOK — More than 12,000 Thai protesters occupied Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej’s office compound for a third day on Thursday, testing the government’s patience in resisting the use of force to arrest organizers and disperse the crowd.
“The court has given me a sword, but I won’t use violence,” Samak told reporters in Bangkok on Thursday. “I want the world to watch the situation and judge what is going on here.”
Samak has sought to avoid clashes because rallies by the same protest group two years ago led to the military coup that toppled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The People’s Alliance for Democracy, whose leaders face arrest and are inside the compound, say Samak is a proxy for Thaksin and should resign.
“Samak can wait out the protesters,” said Jade Donavanik, dean of the law school at Siam University in Bangkok. “The People’s Alliance always held on to their rights according to the constitution, using it as a shield to protect them. But now they have broken their own shield.”
Police have offered free buses to take activists home, and are under orders not to enter the compound to arrest leaders. The number of protesters, which fluctuates throughout the day, has swelled to more than 12,000, said Surapol Thuanthong, a police spokesman. That’s more than double the 5,000 estimated on Wednesday, and less than the 30,000 that took part in the first day of protests on Tuesday, that included blocking streets.
Inside, cases of water bottles had been stacked up to eye level and large tents helped protect protesters from the heat of the sun. A dozen protesters wearing motorcycle helmets and carrying black batons stood in formation at one gate to the compound, and other makeshift security guards monitored the scene with golf clubs in hand.
A Bangkok University poll of 1,023 city residents released Wednesday found that about 70 percent disagreed with the sit-in that started Tuesday as well as efforts to disrupt traffic.
“Protest leaders are now using kids, women, the elderly and monks as human shields,” Surapol said earlier on Channel 3. “There are many people who are not aware that what they are doing is illegal and they will be brought to justice.”
Nine alliance members, led by Sondhi Limthongkul, an estranged business associate of Thaksin, have been charged with treason and face possible death sentences or life in prison.
The military has ruled out a coup to end the street protests, which have contributed to a 22 percent decline in the benchmark SET Index since they began May 25. The baht has fallen more than 6 percent in the same period.
“If they use force to arrest us, there would be a problem,” Suriyasai Katasila, a People’s Alliance spokesman who is among those facing arrest, told Channel 3. The group plans to appeal a Civil Court order issued Wednesday night calling for the protesters to disperse, he said.
Samak, who had watched the demonstrations at army headquarters for the past two days, sang 11 Thai traditional songs Wednesday night at an event for Olympic athletes, Channel 3 reported. He has called the protesters’ demands that he resign “unreasonable” and said police will be “soft and gentle” to demonstrators.
Protesters have named new leaders to take over should Sondhi and his colleagues be detained.
Sondhi and the People’s Alliance have called for a mostly appointed parliament to take over from Samak’s People Power Party, which is comprised of Thaksin’s allies. Last December the party rode a wave of rural support to win the first election held after the coup.
 “Sondhi is not a viable alternative and really never has been a political alternative at all,” Michael Montesano, an independent political economist in Southeast Asia, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday. The People’s Alliance has called for a political system that would bring a “much less democratic parliamentary structure and a return to military influence,” he said.
Sondhi led protests before the coup against Thaksin two years ago. The former prime minister fled to London earlier this month claiming the judiciary is corrupt after the courts issued charges against him, including abuse of power.
“We are not a mob, we are civilized people,” said Chokchuang Chutinaton, a 63-year-old retired doctor who has joined the protests.

TITLE: Gustav Kills 22, Heads Toward Jamaica, Cuba
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: HAVANA — Tropical Storm Gustav rumbled Thursday toward Jamaica and Cuba and threatened to take hurricane force winds to Louisiana after leaving 22 people dead in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The eye of the storm was expected to pass “very close” to Jamaica later Thursday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said, while 50,000 people were evacuated from zones at risk in eastern Cuba.
Gustav, which struck Haiti as a Category One hurricane on Tuesday, could regain hurricane strength by Friday, the hurricane center warned.
The storm pushed oil prices higher on fears that the storm could strike rigs when it moves to the Gulf of Mexico.
Blowing winds of 75 kilometers per hour, Gustav was located about 130 kilometers northeast of Kingston and 165 kilometers southwest of Guantanamo, Cuba, the center said in its latest advisory.
With memories of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 still fresh, U.S. federal and Louisiana state authorities prepared for the worse to avoid repeating the botched disaster response of three years ago.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency and announced plans to begin evacuating coastal areas ahead of the storm.
“As long as there is a chance that we’ll be in this storm, I’ll be here in Louisiana,” said Jindal, warning he may miss next week’s Republican National Convention to nominate John McCain as the party’s candidate for the White House.
The hurricane center’s five-day forecasting map shows Gustav could strike southeastern Louisiana on Monday evening as a hurricane.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged Gulf Coast residents to get ready for the storm, with the city of New Orleans in its possible path.
“Regardless of its predicted path, it is important for citizens in the Gulf Coast region to listen to what their local officials are advising over the course of the next few days and to take these simple steps to prepare,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who was criticized for his administration’s botched response to Katrina, made plans to leave the Democratic National Convention early so he could also help the city prepare for the storm.
The Cuban Meteorological Institute said Gustav could strengthen to a Category Two or Three hurricane on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale, with five being the most powerful kind.
The Cuban government has downgraded its hurricane warning for the eastern province of Granma with a tropical storm warning and other hurricane watches were dropped, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

TITLE: Busch, Ewards on Probation
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DAYTONA BEACH, Florida — NASCAR placed Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards on probation Wednesday for the next six Sprint Cup Series races, the result of their on-track incident last weekend at the end of the race at Bristol Motor Speedway.
During the cooldown lap after Edwards’ Ford took the checkered flag for Roush Fenway Racing, Busch drove alongside Edwards and bumped his car. Edwards responded by driving the nose of his car into the right side of Busch’s Toyota, spinning him out.
The postrace incident was apparently a reaction to Edwards nudging Busch aside with 30 laps to go Saturday night. Busch had led the previous 415 laps.
Busch was unrepentant after the race, saying, “We’ll go on and we’ll race him that way in the Chase if that’s the way he wants to race.”
Edwards wasn’t backing down, either.
“A real smart racer explained it to me this way after he wrecked me and I was real mad. He said, ‘I just had to look at your rear bumper and decide if you would do this to me, and you had, and so it was a real simple decision,”’ Edwards said. “I’d do it again.”
Both drivers were later summoned by NASCAR to explain their actions.
This is just the latest development in a growing rivalry between the 23-year-old Busch and the 29-year-old Edwards, the winningest drivers in Cup this season.
Busch, who drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, has been the most dominant driver this season, winning eight times and building a lead of 212 points over runner-up Edwards in the Cup standings with two races remaining before the start of the 10-race Chase. But Edwards, who now has six wins, has come on strong in recent weeks, winning two in a row and three of the last four races.
The points race would have been even closer if not for a penalty Edwards received for racing without a cover on his oil tank after winning at Las Vegas. He was docked 100 points and NASCAR also took away the 10 bonus points for the win that would have transferred to the Chase.