SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1540 (1), Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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TITLE: Snow, Ice Wreak Havoc Across City
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Snow ploughs are now active on the streets of St. Petersburg, but vast amounts of snow and life-threatening icicles remained visible even in the center on Monday. On Friday, a woman was killed by a falling icicle on Prospekt Yuriya Gagarina in the south of the city, ABNews reported Monday. She died on the spot.
The woman was the first fatality, while more than ten people have been injured by icicles and more than 500 have sustained injuries from falling over in streets, some of which have not been cleared since the heavy snowfalls in late December.
Although City Governor Valentina Matviyenko and some local media referred to the record-breaking volume of snow that fell on Dec. 24 and Dec. 26 as the reason for the blocked roads and sidewalks, she admitted that efforts to clear the snow were not satisfactory and threatened to fire officials if the city was not cleared by Feb. 1.
“If they can’t, they will do some other work — knit socks in the evenings,” Matviyenko was quoted by Interfax as saying on Friday. Earlier she admitted that the city was “on the verge of chaos” due to the snow. At one point, it was announced that City Hall had purchased 2,000 shovels to give away to residents of the 4.7-million city.
A local weather expert said the Dec. 26 snowfall (28 millimeters of precipitation in the form of snow) was the heaviest in the past 130 years in St. Petersburg, leading to 40-to-50-centimeter snow cover compared to the norm of 14 centimeters.
“In past years, the snow fell gradually and there were a few days in which to clear it,” Alexander Kolesov, the chief weather expert of the northwest branch of the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, said by phone on Monday.
“But here we had two days of intense snowfalls, and the city got buried.”
Residents were enraged upon finding their cars buried under snowdrifts and the streets and roads barely passable, some comparing the situation to the Siege of Leningrad during WWII. The lack of snowplows was complained about in many blogs during the two weeks following the December snowfalls.
On her blog, the author Tatyana Tolstaya called on Matviyenko to take a shovel and clear some snow.
“Bureaucrats are singing their same old song: ‘The snowfall of the century’ and crap like this,” she wrote on Dec. 27.
“The money has been stolen, there are no snowplows, but in answer to inconvenient questions on air, they always say, ‘Everything’s under control.’”
During one of several protests, a group of anarchists wearing Matviyenko masks and equipped with shovels cleared an area in front of Gostiny Dvor on Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, on Jan. 7. The leaflets they distributed quoted the sums spent by the city on purchasing snowplows and other equipment.
City Hall’s Maintenance and Roads Committee reported that 1,263 snowplows and other special vehicles, 954 street cleaners and more than 2,000 soldiers were clearing snow on Dec. 26, according to Interfax, but critics expressed doubts about the figures.
“When all this snow had just fallen, nobody saw any snowplows in the city; later they appeared on the main roads, but smaller roads are still piled up with snow,” Alexander Shurshev, deputy chairman of the local branch of the Yabloko Democratic Party, said on Monday.
“If you go to the Maintenance and Roads Committee’s web site, where you can check online how many vehicles are operating in the city at the moment, you can only count a few dozen vehicles — up to 50 — while we were told that hundreds of them were in use,” he said.
“Every year Matviyenko inspects the city’s army of new equipment — where is it now? That’s the question.”
TITLE: Pro-Russia Candidate Leads in Ukraine Vote
AUTHOR: By Douglas Birch
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV — Voters in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election gave opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych, the 2004 Orange Revolution’s chief target, a big lead over his rival, Orange heroine and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
But that advantage in Sunday’s vote could prove illusory when the two go head to head next month in the final round of voting, and many expect a very close race.
No matter who wins the Feb. 7 runoff, when it comes to the most important policy issue facing Ukraine, relations with Russia, both candidates may have little choice but to follow the same path.
Analysts say Yanukovych’s 35.4 per cent to 25 per cent lead over Tymoshenko, with 96.5 per cent of votes counted Monday, is misleading, because she is likely to pick up most of the votes scattered among 16 also-rans. There was a strong turnout, with almost 67 per cent of eligible voters casting ballots.
Some analysts say that despite Tymoshenko’s second-place finish, her political skills and sharp instincts will give her the edge in the runoff.
“Yanukovych’s voter base has been exhausted. Although it was strong and compact and never betrayed him, it did not grow,” said Viktor Nebozhenko, director of the sociology institute Ukrainian Barometer. “Tymoshenko, as a great communicator, has a chance to win this election.”
It’s rare for a woman to hold high political office in the former Soviet Union, and Tymoshenko has her detractors. But many Ukrainian women say they are proud of her status and see her as a role model, even if they don’t always admire her political moves.
Some polls show Tymoshenko trailing Yanukovych in a head-to-head matchup, but analysts say Tymoshenko’s strength is difficult to measure because much of her support comes from rural areas, where voters are harder for surveys to reach.
In the runoff election, analyst Oleksandr Dergachev said, many voters will turn against Yanukovych because of what he called “high levels of distrust” that have prevented him from getting more than 40 per cent of the vote in nationwide elections.
“It is difficult to predict the outcome of the second round, but Yanukovych will find it harder to expand the electorate than Tymoshenko,” Dergachev said.
Some disappointed candidates may throw their weight behind Yanukovych, but analysts say voters probably won’t follow their lead.
Despite their policy and personal conflicts, Tymoshenko and Yanukovych share a similar view of Ukraine’s relations with Russia, its giant neighbor to the east, by far Ukraine’s biggest trading partner and the region’s dominant military power.
In the future, NATO membership is out. There will be no more Kremlin-bashing in Kiev, and relations with Georgia will not be nearly as close as they were under Orange President Viktor Yushchenko, who was trounced in Sunday’s ballot, getting just 5.5 per cent of the vote.
Five years ago many Orange protesters dreamed of breaking Ukraine’s historic dependence on Moscow and becoming part of Western Europe.
But they’ve had a rude awakening, in the form of a battle with Russia over energy prices, the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and one of Europe’s worst recessions.
All seemed to demonstrate that like it or not, Ukraine couldn’t get along without good relations with Moscow, its historic ally.
The blunt-spoken Yanukovych, a former electrician and factory manager, has pledged to scrap Ukraine’s NATO bid and elevate Russian to the status of a second official language alongside Ukrainian.
Tymoshenko, a heroine of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution, in 2007 criticized what she called Russia’s imperial ambitions. But in the past year she has made peace with the Kremlin on energy and security issues.
Despite warnings of large-scale election fraud in the days leading up to Sunday’s vote, officials and international election observers said the ballot was fair and orderly.
“The polling in Ukraine yesterday was overall the same as polling in any other democratic country,” Matyas Eorsi, chairman of the observation mission from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, said Monday.
“It is the first time since independence (in 1991) that it has been possible to say this. Ukraine deserves enormous congratulation for this.”
Joao Soares, president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, said the election was “very promising for the future of Ukraine’s democracy.”
Five years ago, fraud allegations sent tens of thousands of Ukrainians into the streets of Kiev, demanding an end to what they regarded as a corrupt regime. After weeks of protests, Yushchenko beat Yanukovych in a court-ordered revote.
Yushchenko’s win was hailed in the West as a victory by democratic forces over the cynical veterans of Ukraine’s Soviet regime. But in Moscow, many saw it as part of a sinister Western plot to surround and weaken Russia.
On Sunday, Yanukovych celebrated turning the tables on Yushchenko and his Orange forces. “Today marks the end of Orange power,” he declared, with grim satisfaction. “There will be no room for (Yushchenko) in the second round. He has officially lost the faith of the people.”
After his election, Yushchenko became embroiled in political skirmishing that paralyzed the government and he failed to push through many of his promised reforms.
Ukraine’s currency crashed in 2008, the economy sputtered and the International Monetary Fund had to step in with a $16.4 billion bailout. Ukraine’s gross domestic product plunged by 15 per cent in 2009, according to the World Bank, which estimates that the country will see anemic growth this year.
Yury Yakimenko, an analyst at Razumkov Center, said the presidency itself is hopelessly compromised, because the office’s powers were given to parliament as part of a deal that ended the 2004 conflict.
“Either Tymoshenko or Yanukovych will be forced to reform the Constitution to have real authority to overcome the crisis,” Yakimenko predicted.
TITLE: Medvedev’s Photo Outdoes Putin’s Painting
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: President Dmitry Medvedev has outdone his popular predecessor Vladimir Putin — as an artist.
A photograph taken by Medvedev of the Kremlin in the Siberian city of Tobolsk was sold for 51 million rubles ($1.7 million) at a charity auction in St. Petersburg on Saturday night, surpassing the 37 million rubles ($1.1 million at the exchange rate at that time) paid last year for a painting by Prime Minister Putin.
Medvedev’s black-and-white photo of the city’s fortress was snapped up by Mikhail Zingarevich, a board member at Ilim Group, the pulp-and-paper company where Medvedev once worked as a lawyer. Zingarevich said he planned to hang the 69x96-centimeter picture in his office.
“Dmitry Anatolyevich has always enjoyed professional photography, and of course, we wanted to obtain his work, especially since the money for it will go to such a good cause,” Zingarevich said.
The proceeds of the auction will be used to buy equipment for a children’s hospital, furniture for World War II veterans receiving long-awaited apartments, and a new kitchen for an alcohol rehabilitation center.
The annual auction, which includes artwork by Russian politicians, athletes and cultural figures, raised 81.5 million rubles, surpassing last year’s total of 70 million rubles.
Another major portion of this year’s charity proceeds was earned by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko. Alexander Yevnevich, general director of the construction store chain Maxidom and a regular buyer at the auction, bought the governor’s picture of “Marble Bridge” for 13 million rubles ($433,000.)
Matviyenko exceeded her personal record from last year of 11.5 million rubles paid for her painting “Metel” (“Blizzard,”) which was also bought by Yevnevich. Maxidom also owns Matviyenko’s picture of “Hedgehog under the Pine Tree” sold at the auction in 2007.
A picture by Ivan Slavinsky, a professional artist who helped the Russian celebrities to paint their works, was sold for 2.5 million rubles ($83,000).
An impressive image titled “The Poet’s Candle” painted by talented St. Petersburg actress Ksenia Rappoport, who won an award for the best female role at last year’s Venice Film Festival, was sold for 1.4 million rubles ($46,600.)
The work of St. Petersburg parliament speaker Vadim Tyulpanov went for one million rubles ($33, 000.)
All the paintings by the 28 participants were inspired by the theme of Tsarskoye Selo, the historic town outside St. Petersburg and former royal retreat that is celebrating its 300th anniversary this year. Participants painted their work outdoors during a 25-day period around Christmas, organizers claim — often in severe conditions of frost and snowfalls that covered the city this winter.
Medvedev’s photographic work was an exception among the paintings, since the president could not visit Tsarskoye Selo due to his work schedule.
“However, the president really wanted to take part, and so he sent a photograph he had taken to the auction,” Matviyenko said.
Medvedev, an avid photographer, chose a scene steeped in Russian tradition. His photograph, taken from the air, shows the white stone walls and towers of the Kremlin. Tobolsk was one of the final homes of Russia’s final tsar, Nicholas II, and his family following the February Revolution in 1917.
Putin, who is still seen by many as the more powerful leader two years after passing the presidency to Medvedev, last year donated a painting titled “Uzor” depicting a frost-rimmed window in a traditional wooden hut.
TITLE: Official Held for $15M Bribe
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A senior investigator was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of soliciting a $15 million bribe from the head of Rosenergomash, a leading electrical engineering manufacturer, the Investigative Committee said.
Andrei Grivtsov, who is in charge of “particularly important cases” for the central investigation department of the Investigative Committee, is accused of demanding the money in exchange for not opening a criminal investigation into Rosenergomash president Vladimir Palikhata, Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said.
A suspected associate of Grivtsov, Sergei Karimov, was detained Thursday as he tried to collect a $8 million first installment of the bribe at Interkommertsbank, Markin said. “According to investigators, he played the role of mediator,” Markin told Interfax. “The money was for … Andrei Grivtsov.”
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court has sanctioned the arrest of Grivtsov and Karimov, who is unemployed. The two men face charges of attempted large-scale extortion and could spend up to 12 years in prison if convicted.
Investigators may also bring charges against a Moscow police officer and a former Moscow prosecutor who is now working as a lawyer, Markin said.
The suspects were detained due to the efforts of Rosenergomash’s security department, the Investigative Committee and the Interior Ministry, he said.
TITLE: German Media Claims Putin Will Dance
At City Ball
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Dresden Opera Ball will be brought to St. Petersburg next fall, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will dance the opening waltz, a German media report said Friday.
The decision to stage a rendition of the Semperoper Ball in Putin’s hometown came after Putin was “thrilled” upon returning from the event last January, the Bild tabloid reported, citing the ball’s organizer, Hans-Joachim Frey.
“He showed a video of the ball to an audience of businessmen and ministers in Moscow and told them ‘I want this too,’” Frey told the tabloid.
Putin, who worked as a KGB officer in Dresden from 1985 to 1990, received a medal of gratitude at the ball last year.
The ball will be held Sept. 17 for 1,700 guests in St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, the paper said.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could not comment on the report because it was outside of his field of competence.
TITLE: Arnie to Get His Hands on Putin’s Bust
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A St. Petersburg sculptor is casting a bronze bust of current prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin to add to the collection of sculptures of former Russian leaders owned by Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The bust has been commissioned by the Russian Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation as a gift for Schwarzenegger, who already has sculptures of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, said the sculptor Alexander Chernoshchyokov.
Chernoshchyokov, who also made the busts of Lenin and Stalin owned by Schwarzenegger, said that working on Putin’s bust has been a greater challenge than the creation of the other two former Russian leaders.
“It’s harder to work on an image of a living person about whom I have already formed an opinion. In addition, it was not easy to capture Putin’s features,” the sculptor said in his cramped studio while displaying the bust, which is currently a sculpture in plasticine that will be used to create the mould.
The studio is located on the ground floor of an old building on Vasilyevsky Island, not far from an apartment in which Putin himself used to live. Putin’s bust stands between sculptures of angels, horses and a full-size sculpture of the conductor and artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Philharmonic Orchestra, Yury Temirkanov.
The sculptor said that he was not a fan of Putin’s, as he “did not agree with many things happening in the country.”
“The most difficult thing to select was the expression on Putin’s face for the sculpture,” he said, standing in front of a display board showing more than a dozen pictures of the current prime minister. The pictures, obtained by the sculptor from The St. Petersburg Times’ photographer Alexander Belenky, included Putin smiling, strict, surprised, pensive and even sad.
“In the end, I had to go for this rather neutral image that is more traditional for busts of state leaders,” Chernoshchyokov said.
“In that sense, it’s easier to work on sculptures of musicians or other cultural personalities, because their images can be more creative,” he said.
However, the sculptor said he was also planning to make another bust of Putin for himself.
“I want to make his image livelier in my sculpture, so that it won’t just be an official sculpture of a state leader — I want it to be of a living person who understands what is going on in the country and in the world,” he said.
Chernoshchyokov, who said he would like to get the prime minister to autograph his work, said he did not know whether Putin knew his bust was being made for Schwarzenegger in Putin’s home city of St. Petersburg. The prime minister’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told him that Putin was not in favor of such undertakings, fearing the encouragement of a personality cult, the sculptor said.
“But I think art has nothing to do with personality cults,” said Chernoshchyokov.
The sculptor said that he has already started collecting pictures of the current president, Dmitry Medvedev, in order to cast his bust for Schwarzenegger in the future.
Putin’s bust, which has yet to be cast in bronze, will be sent to California in early March, the sculptor said, adding that he hoped to hand it to Schwarzenegger in person at the Arnold Classic Bodybuilding Tournament.
In 1991, Chernoshchyokov made a full-size sculpture of Schwarzenegger, which Vladimir Dubinin, then president of the Russian Bodybuilding Federation, presented to Schwarzenegger.
TITLE: 2 Ingush Men Jailed For 2007 Bombing
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A Novgorod court handed down prison sentences Friday to two Ingush natives convicted in the 2007 bombing of the Nevsky Express train, which derailed several railcars and injured dozens of passengers.
Salambek Dzakkhiyev, 41, was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum-security prison after being found guilty of robbery and illegal possession of explosives, while Maksharip Khidriyev, 41, got four years in a medium-security prison on bomb possession charges, said a spokesman for the Novgorod Region Court, Alexander Prokofyev.
Both defendants were acquitted of terrorism and of intentionally injuring the train passengers, Prokofyev told The St. Petersburg Times by phone.
Investigators had accused the suspects of being members of a Chechen rebel group headed by warlord Doku Umarov.
Khidriyev and Dzakkhiyev have maintained their innocence and claimed to have been tortured by police. The two men were convicted of acquiring explosives and transporting them to the Novgorod region to be assembled into the bomb used in the attack, but the suspected mastermind of the bombing, former military cadet Pavel Kosolapov, remains at large. Investigators also accuse him of building the bomb.
Dzakkhiyev’s lawyer, Natalya Teslenko, could not say Friday whether her client would appeal. But she said by telephone that Dzakkhiyev was “displeased” with the verdict because he had expected to be acquitted of all charges.
Khidriyev’s lawyer, Murat Yunusov, told Interfax that his client would appeal.
The defendants can appeal to the Supreme Court within 10 days of receiving copies of the Novgorod court’s verdict, Prokofyev said. The Novgorod court has five days from its ruling to issue the written verdict, he said.
The state prosecutor in the case, Alexander Brusin, said he would also consider appealing the verdict as too lenient, Interfax reported.
A bomb planted on railroad tracks exploded at about 9:30 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2007, as the St. Petersburg-bound Nevsky Express train carrying 251 passengers sped through the Novgorod region from Moscow. Investigators say the bombers had hoped to derail the train while it was crossing a bridge.
After the bombing, authorities deployed 180 armed officers, or about one officer for every four kilometers of track, to patrol the 700-kilometer rail link between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Despite the increased security measures, another bomb exploded on the tracks in late November, killing 27 people aboard the Nevsky Express. The explosion occurred four kilometers from the nearest patrol.
No suspects have been detained in the November bombing.
Following the latest bombing, the government submitted a bill to the State Duma in late December that would introduce huge fines for transportation officials who fail to prevent an accident on public transportation that causes serious injuries or property damages of more than 500,000 rubles ($16,830).
Under the bill, drafted on the order of President Dmitry Medvedev, a transportation official could be imprisoned for up to five years if the accident killed one person and up to seven years if it killed two or more people.
A first reading of the legislation has been tentatively set for Feb. 26.
TITLE: Moscow Finally Gives Backing to Rights Court
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country dropped its long-standing blockade of a much-needed reform of the European Court of Human Rights on Friday when the State Duma ratified Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Deputies voted 392-56 for the reform, with opposition coming from the Communist and the Liberal Democrats’ factions, Interfax reported.
The vote came as little surprise because United Russia, the ruling party that commands a two-thirds parliamentary majority, had announced in December that it would review its position after President Dmitry Medvedev asked deputies to take a fresh look at the matter.
United Russia and the Foreign Ministry said the Council of Europe, the organization overseeing the court, had made concessions that addressed all their reservations. Council of Europe officials, however, stressed that no changes to the protocol had been made.
Thorbjorn Jagland, the council’s secretary-general, promised during a visit to Moscow last month that ratification would significantly increase Russia’s influence over future reforms of the 47-member organization, Kommersant reported Saturday.
One of the reforms that Jagland will suggest this week is to strengthen the link between a member’s budget contributions and its number of staff in the council, the report said.
Such a reform would greatly benefit Russia, which last year contributed 12 percent to the council’s budget. “If this is implemented, the number of Russians in the council will be doubled,” an unidentified source in Strasbourg, the seat of the organization, told Kommersant.
Jagland on Friday praised the Duma’s ratification, saying in a statement that “Russia is sending a strong signal of its commitment to Europe.”
The country had been the only Council of Europe member that refused to ratify the protocol, despite the fact that a third of the cases flooding the court come from Russia.
Moscow’s blockade has been explained by its frustration over the court’s many rulings that faulted basic human rights in Russia. The Duma rejected the reform in December 2006, and officials later frequently accused the court of political bias.
Human Rights Watch said last fall that Russia has ignored more than 100 court rulings, many of which found authorities responsible for killings, abductions and torture in Chechnya.
The reform stipulates that a single judge will be able to decide on the admissibility of applications and a three-judge panel will rule on most cases.
This is meant to greatly speed up the court’s work, which currently has a backlog of more than 120,000 cases, which might require seven years’ work.
Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov told Duma deputies on Friday that Moscow had received assurances that its representative in the court would be invited to join hearings of appeals filed by Russians.
He also said the Council of Europe would consult with the government on how to enforce the court’s rulings.
Denisov stressed that all changes had been agreed in writing.
“For years, the Russian side has demanded changes so that Protocol 14 becomes compatible with Russian law. Now that our criticism has been met, we can ratify this document,” Ruslan Kondratov, a member of the Duma’s International Relations Committee, wrote on United Russia’s web site.
TITLE: Zenit FC Introduces Spalletti, Tries to Buy Pavlyuchenko
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s Zenit Football Club wants to buy Russian soccer player Roman Pavlyuchenko, who is currently playing with London’s Tottenham Hotspurs.
Introducing Zenit’s new manager, Luciano Spalletti, at a press conference on Monday, Zenit Football Club President Alexander Dukov said, “We’re ready to buy this soccer player.”
Zenit failed to agree a half-year lease for Pavlyuchenko, so will now attempt to buy the player outright, Dukov said.
Dukov said the purchase of the national team’s forward, Alexander Kerzhakov, was based on Kerzhakov’s own interest in returning to Zenit. Spalletti said that he was also keen for Kerzhakov to return to the club.
Dukov said Zenit’s task in 2010 would be to win the national championship and the Russian Cup, and to play successfully in the European Champions League.
A three-year contract with the club’s new Italian coach would allow Zenit to reach a new level with “one of Europe’s strongest coaches,” he said.
“Spalletti is a respected and experienced coach, a specialist with a fundamental vision for the club’s development that Zenit needs right now,” Dukov said. “The teams he has managed have always demonstrated a clear, attacking style of football that is characteristic of Zenit and loved by our fans,” Dukov said.
Spalletti said it would be “a great honor” for him to work at Zenit.
“It’s important for me to make the club a big family — that’s essential,” Spalletti said.
“The task I’ve been given is to take Zenit to a new level and that’s a challenge for me. A team like Zenit should have big ambitions,” he said.
Spalletti said the club would need to buy in some players to strengthen the team.
Spalletti began his coaching career in 1993. In 1995 he managed Empoli in Italy, before moving to Roma. In 2006 and 2007 Spalletti was named Italy’s best soccer coach.
TITLE: Miracle Rescue in ‘Tense’ Haiti
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russian rescuers pulled out two young Haitian girls still alive from the ruins of a house Saturday, four days after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed Haiti’s capital.
The rescuers, part of a team dispatched to the Caribbean island on four Emergency Situations Ministry jets last week, found the girls buried under rubble in Port-au-Prince.
Pictures of the dramatic rescue show the Russians pulling a naked and distraught Senviol Ovri, 11, out of a narrow hole in what used to be a house and carrying her to a van, where she received water and medical attention.
The rescuers also fished 9-year-old Olon Remi out of the debris Saturday and treated her for dehydration and an injured foot.
The children were among at least six trapped victims found during a search operation that had taken the Russians through 215 houses and two schools by Sunday afternoon, the Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement.
The team was continuing to search for a missing 63-year-old Russian man from St. Petersburg who was married to a Haitian woman and taught at a local university. His wife ran out of the building before it collapsed and feared that he was dead, said Salavat Mingaleyev, head of the Russian team, Itar-Tass reported.
The Foreign Ministry had said Thursday that no Russians had been injured in Tuesday’s magnitude-7 earthquake. It said about 30 Russian citizens were on the island.
Mingaleyev said rescue efforts had to be suspended when it gets dark because of looters. “The situation in the city is very difficult and tense,” he said, Interfax reported.
The rescuers found a woman on Saturday just after they called off the day’s search as darkness fell, he said.
Russia, the United States, China and other countries have sent rescue teams and humanitarian aid to Haiti, but the supplies are insufficient and not reaching the streets fast enough, Vesti-24 state television reported. As a result, injured and hungry homeless people have to fight for food and water, and those who can’t fight face the choice of fleeing the city or dying, it said.
Channel One showed a line of hundreds of homeless Haitians waiting all day among the ruined buildings for water and crackers.
Haitian Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime said about 50,000 bodies have been collected and the final death toll was likely to be between 100,000 and 200,000.
“Who will help us? Nobody cares about us,” a woman in Port-au-Prince said in remarks shown on Channel One. “It seems to me that my days will end right here in this square.”
The Russian rescuers from the Emergency Situations Ministry’s Tsentrospas center have provided aid for 95 injured people and performed 31 surgeries, the ministry said. A total of 138 people have received psychological assistance, it said.
The United Nations announced Saturday that the body of its Haiti mission chief, Hedi Annabi, was found in the rubble of the agency’s collapsed headquarters together with his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, and the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates, from Canada.
About 80 Haitian students live in Russia, and many of them are waiting for word about loved ones back home. People’s Friendship University in Moscow said late last week that it was considering how it could offer support to the some 55 Haitian students on its campus.
TITLE: UN Powers Fail to Agree on Iran Sanctions
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Top diplomats from six key powers focused on possible new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program at a meeting Saturday but reached no agreement, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
Ryabkov said the six powers want to meet again with the Iranians to discuss their October proposal that Tehran exchange uranium for nuclear fuel.
The United States was pushing for new sanctions against Iran at Saturday’s meeting at the European Union headquarters in New York.
Officials from China, Britain, France and Germany also took part in the meeting.
Emerging from the 2 1/2-hour meeting, Ryabkov said, “It is inconclusive in a sense that we didn’t make any decisions right away.”
He said Russia remains committed to the dual-track approach of the six powers — diplomatic and political engagement on the one hand and sanctions on the other.
“We have talked mostly today on the second track, but it doesn’t mean that we should abandon the first one,” Ryabkov said.
He added that Russia believes that there is “still time for meaningful political engagement and efforts to find a solution.”
The meeting was supposed to be of political directors — top diplomats in the countries’ foreign ministries — but China was only represented by a lower-level diplomat from its UN mission, Kang Yong.
After weeks of conflicting responses, Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki in mid-December accepted the uranium-for-nuclear fuel exchange proposal “in principle.”
But in a likely deal breaker, he spoke of exchanging the material in phases rather than all at once as called for in the plan.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that the administration of President Barack Obama has concluded that the best way to pressure Iran to come clean on its nuclear ambitions is to impose new sanctions aimed at the country’s ruling elite.
U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns, who attended Saturday’s talks, warned ahead of the meeting that Iran would face consequences if it does not comply with the international proposal to limit its uranium enrichment program.
TITLE: Medvedev Says START Talks Inching Closer to Agreement
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia and the United States have brought their positions closer over a new START treaty to curb strategic nuclear weapons, President Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday.
“The talks will continue. They are not easy, but in general we have agreed with the Americans on many positions,” Medvedev said at a meeting with the heads of the four State Duma factions at his Zavidovo presidential residence near Moscow.
The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expired Dec. 5, and talks between Washington and Moscow to forge a new accord continue. The new treaty is part of an effort to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations, and both sides have pledged to abide by the terms of the old agreement until a new version can be cemented into place. Among the issues holding up the treaty were the numbers of allowable weapons and verification procedures, both of which require detailed discussion.
“We have made a serious step forward. To a considerable extent, our positions are agreed,” Medvedev said.
The Duma faction leaders urged Medvedev to make sure that the new treaty did not threaten Russia’s security. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said Russia would no longer be equal with the United States if it were not allowed to retain its current nuclear power.
Medvedev said the future treaty must be ratified simultaneously by the two sides.
TITLE: New Cartoon Show Puts Prime Minister Among Men
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to nurture a public image as a tough former KGB spy with bulging muscles and sometimes crude humor, has shown little tolerance for being parodied. Until now.
Channel One viewers saw a cartoon Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev dancing and singing in a new animated show that debuted on New Year’s Eve and will become a twice-a-month fixture on the state-run television channel, starting at 10 p.m. Sunday.
Surprisingly, the new show is directed by Vasily Pichul, the prominent filmmaker who once oversaw NTV’s “Kukly” (Puppets) program, which drew Putin’s wrath over its irreverent parodies of him and was the last television show to needle Putin until it was yanked off the air in 2002.
The new cartoon, “Mult Lichnosti,” or “Animated Personality,” in a nod to the phrase “cult of personality,” offers harmless depictions of Putin and Medvedev, but the mere appearance of the two leaders on the show is raising expectations that the authorities are beginning to loosen their iron grip on the national media and their carefully orchestrated images.
“Before, Putin was shown on the state television channels as a very serious person in advantageous situations, said Yevgeny Kiselyov, NTV’s former chief who was also a target of parody on “Kukly.”
“But when a person is shown as a cartoon, it is hard to present him as a demiurge. I think this is a definite change,” he said.
Kiselyov, a political commentator on opposition-minded Ekho Moskvy radio, said the cartoon marks “the beginning of the desacralization of power.”
The 30-minute “Mult Lichnosti” episode broadcast on New Year’s Eve showed Putin and Medvedev dancing in the style of Soviet-era stand-up comedians, with Medvedev playing a harmonica and Putin shaking a tambourine and slapping it from time to time on his bottom.
The two sing mockingly about Nabucco, the Western-supported pipeline that would bypass Russia to deliver Central Asian gas to Western Europe through Turkey, and President Viktor Yushchenko and his political problems in Ukraine, which votes in a presidential election Sunday.
The dancing duo also sing about Pikalyovo, the Leningrad region town where Putin intervened to curb angry workers’ protests in May, GM’s decision to cancel the sale of Opel to Sberbank, and corrupt bureaucrats.
“There was a time when bureaucrats lived on kickbacks, but I took some measures and they now live somewhere else,” Putin sings, meaning that corrupt officials have been put behind bars.
Putin plays the dominant role in the cartoon, while Medvedev serves more as a back-up singer.
The show also offered story lines without the two leaders, including sketches that poked fun at Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Russian pop stars and sports celebrities.
Putin watched the cartoon and found it amusing, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.
“He watched it with interest. He had a normal, human reaction to it, and he was never opposed to parodies about himself,” Peskov said by telephone.
The cartoon could be an attempt to pre-empt possible public dissatisfaction with Putin and Medvedev by placing them in a mild satirical light, said Andrei Mukhin, a political analyst with the Center for Political Information.
Media analyst Alexei Pankin said a flurry of discussion about the cartoon on Russian blogs reminded him of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s early days “when we were allowed to say something about some Politburo members.”
But he also noted that Channel One viewers, who are fed a steady diet of pro-Kremlin propaganda on the news, would also enjoy elements of the cartoon focused on the Kremlin’s foes.
“Yushchenko and Saakashvili being scolded will resonate with 85 percent of the Russian population,” he said.
A Channel One producer said the show aims to fill pent-up demand for a new kind of humor among viewers.
“We think that shows like ‘Anshlag’ are spent stuff,” said the producer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
The stand-up comedy program “Anshlag” (Full House) is hosted by veteran comedian Regina Dubovitskaya on Rossia state television and is routinely castigated by critics for its vulgar humor.
Channel One director Konstantin Ernst, an avant-garde filmmaker turned Putin loyalist, called the cartoon a dream come true. “I have always wanted to create a project like this, but I wasn’t able to find people able to bring it to life,” he said in a statement.
Ernst conceded in an interview with The New York Times that he had to walk a tight rope to feature Putin and Medvedev because “one should be careful not to do anything insulting.”
Putin took offense with an episode of “Kukly” that depicted him as Klein Zaches, a small and ugly creature from the well-known novel of the same name by 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, said Viktor Shenderovich, the satirist who wrote most of the scripts for “Kukly” during its run from 1995 to 2002.
The show didn’t last long after that.
Shenderovich criticized “Mult Lichnosti” as “a parody on satire.”
“This is PR trying to act as a satire. This is the most disgusting thing possible,” Shenderovich said on Radio Liberty on Jan. 4.
The New Year’s debut of “Mult Lichnosti” had an audience of 14 percent of all television viewers during its time slot, according to the TNS market research agency. In comparison, 20 percent of all viewers watched Medvedev’s New Year’s address on the same channel.
“Kukly,” in contrast, was a top-rated show during its heyday, frequently pocking fun at then-President Boris Yeltsin and his often-changing Cabinet of ministers. Vodka and pharmaceutical tycoon Vladimir Bryntsalov once even offered to pay the show to introduce a puppet depicting him.
“Kukly” also provoked controversy while Putin was still unknown. In 1995, acting Prosecutor General Alexei Ilyushenko tried to ban the program in an unsuccessful crackdown that he later admitted was “a mistake.”
Putin has rarely been parodied on the main television channels since “Kukly,” with the exception of an occasional, light-hearted impression by comedian Maxim Galkin.
TITLE: Award-Winning Mock Documentary Faces Ban for Extremism
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An award-winning film about skinheads is causing a stir among prosecutors who cannot seem to decide whether it should be banned as extremist.
Samara prosecutors asked a local court last year to ban the film, “Russia-88,” because of numerous ethnic slurs made by its characters.
But the Prosecutor General’s Office ordered Samara prosecutors on Thursday to withdraw its court request ahead of a review of the case.
If a court were to declare the film as extremist, the Justice Ministry would automatically put it on a list of banned extremist materials. Distribution of extremist materials is punishable by a fine.
In their filing, Samara prosecutors cited an assessment from Samara State University professor Shamil Makhmudov, who said “Russia-88” contains hate speech and propagates race supremacy.
The Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement that it has received two similar assessments from other experts.
But the three assessments are incomplete and therefore require a review before the extremism request is sent to court, prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Marina Gridneva said in the statement.
“Since those findings were not presented in full, and parts of the findings do not correspond with one another, a further analysis is needed,” she said.
“Russia-88” director Pavel Bardin welcomed the order to pull the court case for a review and said he believed that the film would not be banned now.
He said he had obtained assessments from specialists on extremism who found that the film was not extremist.
“There have been a number of different assessments, and no experts have considered this film extremist,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
The film, released in 2008, is a mock documentary about the daily lives of a skinhead gang. While it did not have a nationwide release, it was shown in a number of movie theaters around the country and won prizes at a Khanty-Mansiisk film festival in March and the Berlin Film Festival in June. The film’s main protagonist is a young skinhead leader who hates and attacks dark-skinned people, only to find out that his sister is dating a native of the Caucasus. While the film is fictional, it is made in a mock documentary style and includes interviews between the actors and real Russians who speak against dark-skinned people in Russia.
“I wanted to make a film that presents conflicting opinions,” Bardin said. “That means the movie had to touch on painful subjects.”
“Russia-88” is Bardin’s first serious movie. The son of prominent animator Garry Bardin, he previously worked on pure entertainment projects including the “Club” series on Russian MTV.
??A State Duma deputy has called on the latest installment in the “Call of Duty” video game series to be included on the Justice Ministry’s list of extremist materials, Itar-Tass reported Thursday.
Valery Seleznev, a deputy with the Liberal Democratic Party, said “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” contains “multiple and detailed scenes of violence” and allows players to destroy an airport and kill an agent from the Federal Security Service. The first-person shooter game, which has raised concerns in several countries, topped $1 billion in global sales this week.
TITLE: Ruble’s Free Float Looks Set to Be Delayed to 2011
AUTHOR: By Paul Abelsky and Denis Maternovsky
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia will probably delay the ruble’s free float beyond the official target of 2011 after policy makers signaled the economy is unprepared for unrestricted currency trading, according to Citigroup Inc.
The central bank spent a third of its foreign-currency reserves, or $200 billion, between August 2008 and January 2009, to help cushion a 35-percent devaluation in the currency as the price of oil, Russia’s main export, tumbled more than 75 percent. The ruble has regained almost a quarter of its value against the dollar in the past year as the global economic recovery buoyed commodity prices.
“Russia is likely to return to some form of the heavily-managed exchange rate regime that existed pre-crisis” to limit swings that hurt the economy, Elina Ribakova and Natalia Novikova, Moscow-based economists at Citigroup, wrote in a research report e-mailed Friday.
Russia’s economy, which will probably grow 3 percent after an 8.5 percent contraction in 2009, remains “insufficiently diversified” and is “unprepared for a full-fledged floating exchange rate,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last month. The world’s biggest energy exporter will “cautiously” introduce measures that allow the ruble to trade freely as it diversifies its economy, he said.
The central bank, which steers the ruble against a target dollar-euro basket, wants a free floating ruble by 2011 and has signaled it will scale back its management of the currency in the interim.
The regulator is halfway, “maybe further,” toward allowing the ruble to trade freely, Bank Rossii Chairman Sergey Ignatiev said on Nov. 18. Even so, the central bank will maintain its foreign-currency market interventions in the “next few years” because of the country’s exposure to volatile oil prices, Ignatiev has said.
The ruble weakened 0.4 percent to 29.5500 per dollar in Moscow trading Friday, trimming last week’s gain to 2.4 percent. The currency advanced 0.6 percent to 42.4775 versus the euro, leaving it at 35.3666 against the target currency basket. Russia’s currency remains within the 26 to 41 band the central bank pledged Jan. 22, 2009, to defend.
Bank Rossii will seek to accumulate reserves and resist the ruble’s appreciation in the first three months of this year and the start of the second quarter, according to Citigroup, which expects the ruble to strengthen to 34 against the basket toward the end of the year.
A recovery in domestic demand and accelerating inflation will force the central bank to let the ruble strengthen in the second half, the economists wrote.
Investors increased bets Friday that the ruble will weaken further, with non-deliverable forwards showing the currency at 29.87 per dollar in three months, from an NDF of 29.78 on Jan. 14. The contracts are a guide to expectations of currency movements as they allow foreign investors and companies to fix the exchange rate at a particular level in the future.
TITLE: Cherney Faces Travel Problems
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Businessman Michael Cherney has been restricted from traveling abroad after an international warrant was issued for his arrest on accusations of money laundering and participating in organized crime.
Cherney, also known as Mikhail Chernoi, said the accusations were engineered by Oleg Deripaska, whom he is suing in London for a stake in United Company RusAl.
Information that an international warrant was issued for Cherney’s arrest was posted on Interpol’s web site, and the order was given by a Spanish court. The businessman has been implicated in a case involving the laundering of 4 million euros ($5.8 million) through the “Russian mafia.”
The Spanish court issued the order for his arrest in May, and Spanish prosecutors asked their British counterparts to arrest and extradite Cherney from London to Spain. But British authorities released him after interrogation, El Mundo newspaper reported. In October, the newspaper reported that Spanish police were interested in Deripaska’s possible connection to the case.
“Why are you just now deciding to write that there’s an international warrant out for me? I’ve been on the Interpol list since summer because of the Spanish case,” Cherney said, adding that it was probably representatives of Deripaska who alerted reporters to the warrant in order to distract the media from another issue.
On Jan. 13, a Tel Aviv court passed down a ruling in a suit brought by Cherney against several Israeli citizens who, according to Cherney, falsified data for the investigation in Spain.
“One of the defendants admitted that Deripaska himself ordered the collection of information that was the basis for the criminal case against me in Spain,” Cherney said. “But Deripaska dug himself into a hole — in the course of the case, the Spanish prosecutor accused Deripaska of the same thing as me! The Spaniards think that we’re both bosses in the Izmailovsky gang but that I’m higher up, and that with the advance Deripaska gave me for part of RusAl I bought some real estate in Spain and, in doing so, laundered the money. I’m sure the next warrant will be issued for Deripaska.”
A Deripaska representative dismissed the notion that there was any connection between Deripaska and Cherney’s problems. “Deripaska doesn’t have, never had and cannot have any relationship with him,” the representative said. “His statement about Deripaska’s connection to illegal data collection is also false and absurd.”
Representatives of the Spanish court and prosecutor’s office did not respond to a Vedomosti request for comment.
Cherney said the fact that there is a warrant out for his arrest and that he has been forced to stay in Israel won’t interfere with his suit against Deripaska in London.
Lawyers, on the whole, agree. If Cherney goes to London, he could be arrested, but Cherney’s lawyers could petition the court to allow him to testify via video link, said Valery Tutykhin, a partner at John Tiner & Partners.
A staff member at the London High Court said cases using teleconferencing were relatively common, but it is up to the judge as to whether it will be allowed. Requests for video links are sometimes denied, but the threat of arrest could count as a good enough reason to justify such a measure, said Sergei Sokolov, a partner at Marks & Sokolov.
Cherney is seeking $3 billion in compensation from Deripaska for a stake in RusAl that he sold in 2001.
TITLE: Consumer Confidence Rises, Analysts Predict Sales Increases
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Consumer confidence in the fourth quarter of 2009 rose to the same level as a year earlier, according to data released Thursday, but sentiment has a long way to go before reaching precrisis levels.
The State Statistics Service said its main confidence index increased to negative 20 percent, from negative 25 percent at the end of the third quarter. That compares with a 1 percent figure from the third quarter of 2008, when the global economic crisis was just unfolding.
The index shows the difference between the percentage of respondents who believe that the economy will worsen and those who think that it will improve, excluding neutral responses. The 1 percent figure for the third quarter of 2008 was the highest result since 1998, when the service began conducting quarterly surveys.
The latest survey of 5,000 Russians aged 16 and older, conducted in November, found that 21 percent expected positive changes in the economy, up from 18 percent in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the number of respondents with a negative view of the economy fell to 25 percent, from 29 percent.
The service also recorded an uptick in the number of Russians expecting their personal financial situation to improve in the next 12 months. Thirteen percent responded positively, compared with 11 percent in the third quarter.
Slightly more than half, however, said their financial situation would not change in the coming year.
Analysts said the increases were expected and likely to continue.
“Why wouldn’t they go up? In the fourth quarter, we saw clear signs of macroeconomic improvements,” said Mark Rubenstein, deputy head of research at Metropol. Russians’ “expectations of significant further layoffs were much lower,” he said.
With renewed optimism among consumers, retailers may see some increases in sales, probably with electronic and other big-ticket retailers, said Mikhail Krasnoperov, an analyst at Troika Dialog.
TITLE: MICEX Reaches Highest Level in 17 Months
AUTHOR: By Jason Corcoran
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Russian stocks rose Monday, sending the MICEX Index to its highest level in 17 months, as Morgan Stanley upgraded commodity producers and UBS said the rally in world’s best-performing equity market in 2009 has more to go.
Severstal, the nation’s biggest steelmaker, and Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel jumped more than 5 percent after Morgan Stanley raised price estimates for metals and mining stocks 28 percent on average. The 30-stock MICEX advanced 1.4 percent to 1,472.49 as of 4:19 p.m. in Moscow, extending this year’s rally to 7.5 percent.
Steelmakers have led gains this year after brokerages including BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research, Deutsche Bank and Troika Dialog raised recommendations and price estimates for commodity producers on the outlook for higher raw-material prices. Even after last year’s 121 percent surge in the MICEX, the gauge trades at 9.8 times estimated 2010 earnings, the cheapest among 21 emerging markets, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“Russia is the least expensive market in the global emerging market universe despite having one of the highest earnings growth,” Dmitry Vinogradov, a Moscow-based analyst at UBS, wrote in a report dated Monday. The “rally is not exhausted,” he wrote.
Earnings per share will grow 38 percent, according to UBS, which recommended Gazprom, Lukoil, Sberbank, Mechel and Norilsk Nickel among its top picks. Mechel, Evraz and Norilsk Nickel were Morgan Stanley’s favoured stocks.
Shares surged last year as signs of a recovery in the global economy spurred gains in oil and metals prices.
“Overall, we remain bullish on commodities as an asset class,” Dmitry Kolomytsyn, a Morgan Stanley analyst in Moscow, wrote in a report Monday. Commodity prices, especially for coking coal and iron ore, will recovery this year as global steel production increases, according to Kolomytsyn.
Severstal jumped 5.9 percent to 368 rubles, surging 45 percent in the first six days of Moscow trading this year, the biggest gain on the Micex. Magnitogorsk, the country’s third-largest steelmaker, rallied 5.1 percent to 31.45 rubles, up 27 percent this year.
Mechel rose 1.9 percent to 616.50 rubles, and Evraz Group climbed 2.5 percent to $37.15 in London. Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s biggest mining company, increased 1.80 percent to 4,957.58 rubles in Moscow trading.
Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, advanced 2.6 percent to 90.40 rubles, headed for the highest close since Feb. 4, 2008.
Vedomosti reported Sberbank cut rates it pays depositors, helping to reduce costs. UBS on Monday raised its price estimate for Sberbank to $4.50 from $3 on the outlook for higher lending growth and lower provisions.
TITLE: ‘Avatar’ Breaks Box Office Record
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — “Avatar” broke Russia’s box office record, overtaking the domestic comedy “Irony of Fate 2” less than a month after the release of James Cameron’s futuristic 3-D adventure, Booker’s Bulletin said Wednesday.
“Avatar” grossed more than $70 million from Dec. 16, when it opened in Moscow, to Jan. 10, the industry research group said.
The movie has played on a record 1,330 screens in the former Soviet Union, excluding Ukraine and the Baltic states, according to Russian Film Business Today magazine.
The film showed on 353 screens in 3-D, including IMAX, which yielded just over half of its opening gross, the magazine reported.
“‘Avatar’ is unique because people think of it as a 3-D amusement ride, not a movie, so the popularity is unprecedented,” Boris Babushkin, editor of Booker’s Bulletin magazine, said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Yevroset Plans IPO
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Yevroset, Russia’s largest handset retailer, plans to conduct an initial public offering next year, Kommersant reported, citing the company president.
Yevroset will sell shares in 2011 “if the market is good,” Alexander Malis said in an interview published Monday in the Moscow-based newspaper.
Medvedev Orders Audit
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the government’s budget watchdog to audit 2.5 trillion rubles ($84 billion) in planned investments by state-run corporations, Interfax reported.
Medvedev told Audit Chamber officials that he’s not “indifferent” to how the “astounding” amount of money is being spent, the Russian news service reported Monday.
Severstal Cuts Losses
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Severstal, Russia’s largest steelmaker, will wind down its unprofitable Carrington Wire Ltd. unit in the U.K., citing a shrinking market.
Severstal acquired Elland, West Yorkshire-based Carrington in 2006. Sales declined over the last five years and the business is “no longer viable,” Moscow-based Severstal said in an e-mailed statement Monday.
Deripaska Reunited
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Oleg Deripaska’s Russian insurer Ingosstrakh will buy half of Bank Soyuz, the failed lender formerly owned by the billionaire, from an affiliate of Gazprom, the central bank said.
The federal Deposit Insurance Agency will buy 50 percent plus one share in the lender and Ingosstrakh will get the rest for a total of 5 billion rubles ($169 million), Bank Rossii said in an e-mailed statement Monday.
Chinese Car Plant
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Chinese cars including those of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. are being assembled at a plant in Russia’s Northern Caucasus region, Vedomosti reported, citing the chief executive officer of the project.
The Derways plant in the Karachay-Cherkessia region is spending about $85 million to be able to produce 100,000 vehicles a year by 2014, the Russian newspaper reported Monday, citing Alexander Romanov.
TNK-BP ‘Worth $50B’
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — German Khan, one of four billionaire shareholders in TNK-BP, said the Russian oil producer is worth as much as $60 billion, or twice the company’s current market value, Vedomosti reported.
Moscow-based TNK-BP’s “fair market value” is between $50 billion and $60 billion, Khan said in an interview published in the Russian newspaper Monday.
VEB Receives Loans
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Vnesheconombank, or VEB, Russia’s state development bank, received loans of $700 million and 100 million euros ($144 million) from a group of international banks.
The Moscow-based lender agreed to pay 2.75 percentage points over Libor and Euribor for the three-year loans, VEB said in an e-mailed statement Friday.
TITLE: Retailers, Banks Crown List Of Fund Managers
AUTHOR: By Rachel Nielsen
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Some of the top Russia fund managers, fresh off 1,000 percent returns over the past decade, are saying the country’s stocks still look cheap compared with their emerging-market peers, and retailers, banks and consumer-goods makers are among the favorites for 2010.
And those sentiments may be finding broader support, as investors are continuing to pour money into Russian stocks. For the week ending Jan. 13, investors put a net total of $244.7 million into Russia equity funds, according to EPFR Global, a global fund-tracking firm. That was the ninth-consecutive week of increases in inflows to Russia funds, Bloomberg reported Friday.
“The strategy has been very much trying to capture the strong domestic growth of Russia,” said Peter Elam Hakansson, co-manager of the $1.5 billion East Capital Ryssland, referring to his fund’s approach. The Sweden-based mutual fund said it had a return of 121.8 percent in Swedish krona terms and a 139.2 percent return in U.S. dollar terms for 2009.
East Capital said in December that the fund returned 1,524 percent in dollar terms over the past decade — 826 percent better than the dollar-denominated RTS Index over the same period.
Elam Hakansson said his fund was keen on mobile operators, banks, consumer-goods companies and retailers. Banks comprise 15 percent of the fund’s portfolio, retail makes up 8 percent and telecoms constitute 9 percent. He said dairy and baby-food maker Wimm-Bill-Dann, supermarket chain Sedmoi Continent and electronics retailer M.Video were three such companies in the portfolio.
Utilities, which Elam Hakansson called “part of our key theme,” make up about 10 percent of the fund’s holdings.
Retail, consumer goods, utilities and infrastructure also receive the heaviest investment in the Russia-focused funds directed by Prosperity Capital Management, said Liam Halligan, chief economist at PCM.
“The real gains are to be found where there are restructurings,” Halligan said, adding that “restructuring brings productivity gains, which drives shareholder value.”
PCM’S Russia-dedicated funds include a so-called special situations vehicle, Prosperity Quest Fund, with a capitalization of $225 million as of Dec. 31. The firm also holds the $118 million Prosperity Cub Fund and the $773 million Russian Prosperity Fund.
PCM said last week that each of the funds — all based in the Cayman Islands — posted a total return of more than 1,600 percent for the last decade. ??Igor Mikhailov, fund manager for UralSib Fund First, a 9.5 billion ruble ($321 million) open-ended mutual fund, said his 2009 investments were weighted most heavily toward oil, coal and fertilizer stocks, as well as Sberbank.
But in anticipation of a strengthening dollar in 2010, Mikhailov said he was planning to decrease his oil investments.
Though both East Capital and PCM said their funds tended to be “underweight” in oil and gas companies compared with Russian benchmark indexes, they have substantial holdings in the natural resources arena. East Capital Ryssland has 35 percent of its portfolio in gas and oil stocks, according to its web site. And in the past two years, PCM compensated for the effects of the crisis by favoring energy companies more than usual, Halligan said.
UralSib, East Capital and PCM all said Russian equities were inexpensive compared with equities in other emerging markets — a view echoed by other Russia-watchers.
“Russian stocks are trading at a 30 percent to 35 percent discount” to stocks in Brazil, India and China, the other parts of the so-called BRIC emerging-market group, Kingsmill Bond, Troika Dialog’s chief strategist, said in an e-mail.
As for the downside to Russian equity investment — risk — the funds’ managers and staffers were unworried. “The perceived risk of investing in Russia is much higher than the actual risk of investing in Russia,” said Elam Hakansson, of East Capital.
PCM’s Halligan was even more blunt in his assessment of Western investors’ perceptions of the Russian stock market: “Your pension fund was massacred in the past decade because your pension manager … ignores the emerging-market funds,” he said.
But investors may be reconsidering. Over the past year, Russia equity funds have vacuumed in $2.3 billion, said Brad Durham, managing director at EPFR Global. In all of the equity funds tracked by EPFR Global, there is $54.5 billion invested in Russian equities, and in just the past 12 months, there have been $4.6 billion of net inflows into Russian equities by all of those funds, he said.
The interest in Russia also helped the country’s stocks close with healthy gains after their first week of 2010. Despite drops of 0.2 percent on both the ruble-denominated MICEX and the RTS on Friday, they were carried by surges of 5.5 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively, on Monday.
MICEX finished the week up 6 percent, closing Friday at 1452.67, while the RTS gained 7.9 percent, ending the week at 1559.25.
“Money is likely to continue to come into the Russian market as investors seek to escape low growth and highly [indebted] developed markets,” Troika’s Bond said. He also predicted that there would be roughly $20 billion of initial public offerings this year “as Russian companies need capital and have not raised it for some time.
TITLE: Poultry Imports Under Threat
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia may stop importing poultry by 2015, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday, backing a ban imposed on U.S. chicken imports at the beginning of the year.
“We haven’t seen any readiness to meet Russian standards on the part of some of our partners, mainly the companies from the United States,” he said, chairing a meeting on poultry production in Snegirevka, in the Leningrad region. “If our foreign suppliers are unable or reluctant to meet our security requirements, we will use other sources,” he said, Interfax reported.
Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service, signed a decree in June 2008 outlawing the use of chlorine in poultry treatments used by some U.S. producers, but he later pushed back the measure’s starting date to Jan. 1, 2010.
Putin rejected suggestions that the ban was political in nature, saying Russia had simply adopted regulations that were already in effect throughout the European Union.
“One shouldn’t look for political background in this case, God forbid, no political background here!” he said, adding that Russia would gradually replace imported poultry with domestic production and could halt poultry imports altogether in “four or five years.”
The country plans to import a total of 780,000 metric tons of poultry in 2010 and gradually decrease the share of imports to 550,000 metric tons by 2012, according to a decree signed by the government in December.
The government cut the United States’ poultry quota for 2010 to 600,000 metric tons, or 20 percent of the poultry market, last December, down from 750,000 metric tons in 2009.
Putin also accused poultry wholesalers of spreading fears of increased prices and said producers should have invested more in domestic production.
If the proper investment had been made, “retailers that deal with [poultry] imports from abroad wouldn’t find it necessary to scare citizens with an unjustified price increase,” he said.
Wholesale prices for U.S.-imported poultry jumped to 70 rubles ($2.4) per kilogram since the ban was introduced Jan. 1, up 20 percent from 58 rubles at the end of December, Yevgeny Kogan, chairman of the Food Trade Group, which supplies meat and produce to supermarkets, said Wednesday.
“Poultry used to be the cheapest protein in Russia, consumed mostly by low-income individuals. So any price increase could be harmful for sales volumes,” Kogan told Interfax. He added that domestic poultry prices had increased 15 percent since the beginning of the year.
TITLE: FAS Examines Troika Dialog
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Thursday that it was investigating a unit of Troika Dialog, the country’s oldest investment bank, for what it called “unfair competition” in asset management.
The service said it “discerned signs of a violation of anti-monopoly law” in the Troika unit’s distribution of “misleading information regarding asset-management services” for individual clients, it said on its web site.
Troika hasn’t received “official information” from the service and “cannot comment before it is received,” spokeswoman Maria Zhog said in an e-mailed response to questions.
A hearing will be held Feb. 11, the service said. The bank may face a fine of 100,000 rubles ($3,400) to 500,000 rubles if found guilty, Irina Kashunina, a spokeswoman for the service, said by telephone.
TITLE: Car Sales Expected to Steady After Falling 49%
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian car market sunk by 49 percent last year, with annual sales falling to 1.47 million and expected to stay roughly the same in 2010, the Association of European Businesses said Thursday.
The industry had been booming before the economic crisis hit in the fall of 2008, even surpassing Germany as Europe’s largest car market in the first half of that year. But demand has since crumbled, and Russia’s largest carmakers are struggling to remain competitive against foreign brands.
AvtoVAZ retained its spot as the country’s best seller, with four of its Lada models taking the top four spots for a combined 22 percent of the market. Renault’s Logan was the most popular foreign brand, taking fifth place overall, AEB said in a report.
Nine of the 10 best sellers were made domestically. The Uzbek-made Daewoo Nexia was the only exception, placing eighth.
Even with government efforts to stimulate demand, Russia’s car market performed worse than those of other countries, with year-on-year declines of up to 60 percent in some months, David Thomas, head of the AEB’s auto committee, said in the report.
The government raised import tariffs in early 2009, particularly for used cars, which had competed with some new Russian models in the budget segment. In addition, the government introduced a subsidized loan program for Russian-made cars and is planning to start an experimental “cash-for-clunkers” program on March 8, Industry and Trade Minster Viktor Khristenko said Monday.
Sales fell by 44 percent at AvtoVAZ, Russia’s largest automaker, and by 56 percent at GAZ Group, the country’s No. 2 producer. Popular foreign brands were also all down, with drops ranging from Hyundai’s 61 percent to 20 percent for KIA.
Luxury brands performed better than average, with BMW sales dropping by 11 percent, Audi by 12 percent and Mercedes by 28 percent.
Industry experts do not expect any recovery in 2010, and AEB expects total annual sales of 1.4 million to 1.5 million cars and light trucks, with growth occurring in the second half of the year, Martin Jahn, the committee’s deputy chief, said in the report. “The prognosis is rather optimistic and counts on measures like subsidized loans and cash-for-clunkers initiatives to be effective,” he said.
Russian carmakers are not as pessimistic about 2010, with GAZ Group president Bo Andersson hoping for 13 percent growth, he told Reuters this week.
AvtoVAZ has said it hopes to sell 470,000 cars this year. If it maintains its total market share of 23.8 percent, that would imply a Russian car market of 1.97 million cars, a 34 percent increase from 2009.
Total auto production in Russia fell by 59.7 percent in 2009, ASM-Holding, which tracks the auto industry, said in a report Thursday. Passenger car output declined by 59.4 percent, to 596,857 units, of which 53 percent were Russian brands. Production of domestic brand cars fell by 63.9 percent, while production of foreign brands dropped 52.7 percent, the report said.
TITLE: Shadow Economy Is Thriving
AUTHOR: By Paul Abelsky
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s so-called shadow economy may have grown to about one-fifth of output, according to the head of the statistics service, as illegal trade in everything from guns and drugs to gardening and tuition grew.
The shadow economy began expanding after the end of the third quarter last year as the labor market deteriorated, Alexander Surinov, head of the Federal Statistics Service, said in an interview with the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Russia’s economy, which last year contracted the most since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, saw the unemployment rate jump from 7.6 percent in September to a four-month high of 8.1 percent in November.
The shadow portion of the economy covers sectors including the production of banned goods and services, “stealth” output to evade taxes and services such as tutoring and gardening, Surinov said.
The estimate is an “indirect product of our macroeconomic calculations,” Surinov told the newspaper.
Based on a total nominal gross domestic product of 10.5 trillion rubles ($354.9 billion) as reported by the statistics service in the third quarter, the shadow economy was worth about $71 billion. Russia’s GDP was equivalent to 38.5 trillion rubles in 2009, or $1.3 trillion, according to a Finance Ministry estimate.
The country’s statistics service is planning to start research into small businesses next year and wants to improve its coverage of personal incomes to provide a “different quality” of GDP estimates, Surinov said.
While the service’s regional branch offices have come under “certain pressure” from local authorities, federal officials have only criticized the speed with which data are provided and the extent of its revisions of indicators, Surinov said.
TITLE: Forbes to Get $300,000 From a Cybersquatter
AUTHOR: By Aaron Mulvihill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian edition of Forbes has won the use of the domain name Forbes.ru and a record $300,000 in damages from a cybersquatter in a landmark court ruling, the magazine announced Friday.
Forbes and its Russian publisher, Axel Springer Russia, sued Landmark VIP Services, which advertises travel packages on Forbes.ru, for the unauthorized use of the magazine’s trademark in its web address. The travel site was still online Sunday evening.
The Moscow Arbitration Court awarded Forbes $300,000 in damages, the largest compensation payout to date in a Russian case of this kind. Cybersquatting litigation in Russia has often resulted in the awarding of nominal sums, and the Forbes case could mark a departure from that precedent.
In 1999, U.S. camera giant Eastman Kodak sued a Russian firm that was using Kodak.ru in the first such high-profile case and won 2,600 rubles — about $100 at the time — in compensation after a two-year legal battle.
Landmark VIP Services registered Forbes.ru in 2002 and for several years visitors to the page were greeted by an announcement that Forbes would soon be launching a web site, along with a link to the Russian company’s holiday catalogue. More recently, the travel firm added to the page a short biography and portrait of David James Forbes, a 19th-century Scottish naturalist and explorer.
The magazine launched its online version at ForbesRussia.ru in November.
Grigory Punanov, chief editor of ForbesRussia.ru, said he was very satisfied with the outcome. “We fought for a long time for the legal right to use the domain name Forbes.ru,” he said in a statement. “I hope the ruling will enter legal force and that our site will soon be available at that address.”
The ruling is good news for other trademark owners who claim to have found themselves victim to cybersquatters. Burger King filed suit in December in the Moscow Arbitration Court for the use of BurgerKing.ru, which is now jointly held by a Russian and a Dutch company. The fast-food chain has said it is eager to acquire the address before its entry to the Russian market.
With the launch of Cyrillic domain names for commercial entities later this year, some fear that a new wave of cybersquatting may lie ahead. The project became mired in scandal on the first day of priority registration for trademark holders and government bodies in November, when speculators exploited a loophole in trademark law to secure premium .ðô domain names with key words including bank, real estate and cinema.
Financial institutions, in particular, fear a surge in online fraud. If a scammer acquires the domain name of a bank, for example, it could trick customers into visiting the site and revealing account details, a practice known as phishing.
“If we did not register early, we ran the risk of cybersquatters taking the domain names first,” Dmitry Fyodorov, VTB’s head of Internet projects, told The St. Petersburg Times. “It would pose a serious risk to security as well as to our reputation.”
TITLE: President Yanukovych’s Dilemma
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Kiselyov
TEXT: Although the official results of Ukraine’s presidential election have not yet been announced as we go to press, it has been clear all along that a second round of voting, on Feb. 7, will be needed to determine who will be the country’s next president — Viktor Yanukovych or Yulia Tymoshenko. Barring the unexpected, Yanukovych, who lost big in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election to the Orange team of Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko, should get his revenge by beating Tymoshenko in the second round.
There are several reasons behind Tymoshenko’s expected election failure. This is the first time that she has entered a campaign as a member of the ruling power structure and not as an opposition figure, which might be the reason for her low probability of winning the second round. She is running for the presidency while holding the post of prime minister, and thus many Ukrainians blame her (along with Yushchenko) for the host of crises and economic hardships that have rocked the country.
Another of Tymoshenko’s big mistakes was that the once-fiery revolutionary had grown so comfortable sitting in the prime minister’s chair that she did not heed advice to step down from that post and become a leader of the opposition — something she has proven good at.
In addition, there was a whole series of political mistakes that have led to Tymoshenko’s low popularity ratings. For example, her attempt to build a special relationship with Moscow based on her strong personal rapport with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin provided ammunition for her critics, including nationalists and supporters of Ukraine’s integration with Europe, to accuse her of trading away national interests, As a result, Tymoshenko eroded much of her voter base in the central and western regions, where strengthening of Ukraine’s independence from Russia has always been a top priority.
But it would be a mistake to assume that a Yanukovych victory would mean that Ukraine will wholeheartedly embrace Moscow. To be sure, Kremlin insiders affirm that Russian leaders would prefer to see Yanukovych become president, just as they did five years ago. The Kremlin considers him to be more predictable because he is tied to the pro-Russia sentiment of his supporters. But this is only part of the picture. It is correct that Yanukovych’s main electoral base is the industrially developed eastern and southeastern regions of Ukraine, where 17 million of the country’s 37 million voters live and where Ukraine’s main economic potential and its pro-Russia contingent is concentrated.
At the same time, however, it would be naive to believe that those regions are willing to embrace Moscow’s suffocating bear hug. All of the business interests of the financial and industrial magnates in Ukraine’s eastern region are in the West. Rinat Akhmetov, the country’s wealthiest man with a personal worth of $1.8 billion, is Yanukovych’s main sponsor. Akhmetov and most of the other oligarchs built their fortunes in the metals and mining industries, sectors that have few prospects on the Russian market, which has more than its share of metals and other natural resources that compete with Ukraine for export markets.
Although the eastern half of Ukraine is the bastion of pro-Russia sentiment, polls show that they have no desire to reunite with their northern neighbor. In other words, even a victory by pro-Russian Yanukovych is unlikely to bring about a substantial change in Russian-Ukrainian relations. To be sure, Ukraine under Yanukovych would not try to kick Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol or speed up the country’s accession to NATO. But it is important to remember that as prime minister to former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma Yanukovych signed the agreement for Ukraine to join the NATO Membership Action Plan and his party supported the decision in the parliament. At the same time, Yanukovych is unlikely to make any major concessions to Moscow regarding one of the most sensitive issues affecting relations: the transit of Russian gas to Europe through Ukrainian territory. On Friday, during an interview on my television program “Bolshaya Politika,” Yanukovych said Ukraine is paying too much for Russian gas and should renegotiate the terms of its contracts with Moscow. He also said the Kremlin should pay “market prices” for the rights to base its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
But in the long run, Kiev’s relations with Moscow will be determined by how Europe and the United States structure their relationships with Yanukovych. Yanukovych is hungry for international recognition, and if the leaders of the United States, European Union and NATO are smart and do not distance themselves from Yanukovych as they once did from Kuchma, then Yanukovych might turn out to be a pliable partner for the West. This is particularly true considering the acknowledgement among his supporters that Ukraine won’t be able to modernize without large-scale assistance and investment from the West.
The fly in Ukraine’s ointment, however, is that the West has too many problems on its plate to deal with Ukraine. And if the West’s priorities don’t change in the next five years, the future Ukrainian president may have no other choice than to turn to Moscow.
Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Inter television in Ukraine.
TITLE: Gubernatorial Roulette
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: The long New Year’s holiday is a perfect time for the authorities to announce controversial and unpopular decisions. The Kremlin usually uses this trick to avoid unwanted criticism and debate. While most of the country was celebrating and few were following political developments, President Dmitry Medvedev announced his gubernatorial “nominations” (read: appointments) for six regions — something that he probably should have done in September or October.
Medvedev reappointed the incumbent governors in the Kurgan region and Marii-El republic and named new governors to the Volgograd region and the Komi republic.
But by far the most controversial appointments were in the Altai republic and the Primorye region. In 2005, Primorye Governor Sergei Darkin became the first governor to be appointed after then-President Vladimir Putin annulled direct elections following the 2004 Beslan attack. In 2005, Darkin appeared to be one of the more “authoritarian” regional heads because of his past criminal activity. Now, after the authorities conducted a search of Darkin’s residence in May and many of his associates have been arrested, the situation has not improved. Yet the Kremlin has once again placed its trust in Darkin.
Similarly, Medvedev has reappointed Altai’s governor, former federal inspector Alexander Berdnikov — despite his involvement in a high-profile scandal over the illegal hunting of endangered sheep in the republic and a related helicopter crash in early January 2009 in which Alexander Kosopkin, the Kremlin’s envoy to the State Duma, was killed.
These examples may prove that the current system is designed to sideline strong governors while keeping afloat those who are more dependent on the Kremlin — in part because they could face serious criminal charges if they don’t toe the Kremlin line.
At the same time, the heads of the Komi and Volgograd regions are shining examples of Medvedev’s generation. They are from the “Golden 100” presidential cadre reserve, both were previously deputy governors and therefore members of the local establishment, and both came to politics from business relatively recently. This could very well be a new Kremlin model for filling gubernatorial posts with members of the local political elite.
But looking for a pattern to this process is like trying to figure out how to win Russian roulette. There are far too many unpredictable forces and factors at work, and it is never clear in advance which ones will play the decisive role.
What’s more, the Kremlin has repeatedly manipulated the number of terms that governors are allowed to serve. This was exploited in 2004, when Putin coerced governors into rejecting the existing system of direct elections. At the time, most governors were nearing the end of their legal term limits and were therefore willing to embrace the idea of being appointed from Moscow to remain in office.
Several weeks ago, Medvedev announced that he would like to see governors serving no more than three terms — certainly a long time in office. But to be on the safe side, he left open the option of governors serving a fourth term — “in exceptional cases.”
Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: Families of Missing Decry Shadow War in Ingushetia
AUTHOR: By Douglas Birch
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NAZRAN, Ingushetia — Aliskhan Pliyev was talking on his cell phone with his girlfriend one autumn afternoon when two dozen masked men in uniforms stormed into his family’s house, grabbed him and began to hustle him away.
The 30-year-old construction worker’s three sisters screamed, demanding to know where the intruders were taking him. “None of your business!” a man in a black mask shouted, before Pliyev was driven off in a convoy of cars and vans escorted by an armored personnel carrier. He hasn’t been seen since.
Officials here in Ingushetia say they don’t know anything about Pliyev’s abduction, one of scores in recent months that have caused fresh outrage and grief in a region already scarred by more than 15 years of fighting.
But the young man’s kidnapping on the outskirts of Ingushetia’s largest city bears the hallmarks of what rights activists call Russia’s “policy of state terror,” a shadow war against violent Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus.
A central tactic in the war, activists say, is forced disappearances — the brazen snatching of young people from their homes or off the street, often by gangs of masked men who move freely, even in areas heavily patrolled by the military and police. The pace of forced disappearances has doubled in the past year, following a spike in militant attacks on police and authorities, including suicide bombings, ambushes and assassinations.
The lucky ones are brutally interrogated and released. Some turn up dead, their bodies bearing the marks of torture. Other families face the anguish of never knowing the fate of a father, brother or son.
But critics say the kidnappings have aggravated rather than reduced tensions along Russia’s southern border.
Some analysts warn that, after five years of relative calm, anger over the latest rash of kidnappings could inspire a fresh wave of terror attacks in Russia.
Khamatkhan Makhloyev, 62, a retired Soviet construction manager, said more than 20 masked soldiers in unmarked uniforms burst into his family’s red brick home in the quiet Ingush village of Sleptsovskaya at 4 a.m. in late October.
They stormed straight to a third-floor bedroom, savagely beat one son, Ibragim, and dragged off his elder brother, Maskhud, a 27-year-old factory worker. Maskhud hasn’t been seen since.
Sitting somberly in his dining room last month, the elder Makhloyev said he was certain that Maskhud was not a militant and bitterly accused security agencies of acting like “wild animals.” His appeals to President Dmitry Medvedev and Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, he said, have been in vain.
The authorities “are strengthening the militants” through their brutal tactics, he said. “They don’t kill dogs in this way.”
His wife Aminat, 55, a frail woman with dark circles under her eyes, sobbed beside him, silently fingering x-rays of Ibragim’s broken bones.
It’s not clear why intruders grabbed Maskhud, one of six children. But his father said the raiders seized family heirlooms, a kinzhal dagger and a lambswool astrakhan hat, symbols in the Caucasus of the 19th-century guerrillas who fought the imperial Russian army.
Later, standing in the dark courtyard of his home, the elder Makhloyev looked around and shook his head. “I hoped someday to have weddings here, and not just funerals,” he said.
Russian officials have repeatedly rejected charges that security forces engage in systematic rights abuses. Instead, authorities blame militants for abductions and murders, calling them “provocations” intended to turn citizens against Moscow.
A day after the July kidnapping and slaying of rights activist Natalya Estemirova in Grozny, the capital of neighboring Chechnya, Medvedev called accusations that security forces were involved “primitive” and “unacceptable.”
“It’s a deliberate provocation,” he said.
Alison Gill of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch said Medvedev’s remarks “set a limit on the investigation” into Estemirova’s forced disappearance, exempting authorities from scrutiny.
Rights groups say Muslim separatists attack civilians in the Caucasus, often on religious grounds. There have been assaults on fortunetellers, prostitutes and merchants selling alcohol, while a rebel web site has threatened school principals and teachers with death if they ban headscarves or seat girls next to boys in classrooms.
But activists also accuse the government of forced disappearances, illegal detentions, extrajudicial killings and house burnings. In a report last month, the Moscow-based human rights organization Memorial called for an end to “the massive and systematic human rights violations by the security agencies.”
In recent months, kidnappers have increasingly targeted activists like Estemirova, in what rights groups fear is part of a plan to intimidate them into silence. In Ingushetia and Chechnya, where thousands of people have disappeared during post-Soviet Russia’s two wars against separatists, dozens of people who once monitored rights violations have stopped working or fled.
“All rights activists are uneasy,” said one Ingush activist, who spoke on condition that he not be identified because he feared for his life.
He was planning to leave for France, he said, after security officials approached him and warned him that he might be killed.
He said one officer told him: “We are with the special services. We are not simple cops. Think about that.”
Lidia Yusupova, a Chechen human rights lawyer and 2009 candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, said she might have been a target of the same shadowy men who abducted and killed Estemirova.
Two suspicious men staked out her apartment in Grozny and questioned neighbors the day before Estemirova was killed, her friends told her. She wasn’t home at the time.
“It could not be just a coincidence,” she said in an interview in the cramped offices of a Chechen rights group in central Moscow. “Maybe they had an order to take away some well-known rights activist.”
Some are abducted, activists say, after their names surface during brutal interrogations. Often, kidnappers target the relatives of known or suspected militants.
In some cases, the disappeared seem to have the wrong friends, attend the wrong mosque or otherwise raise suspicions, for example, by having a wolf call ring tone on their cell phone. In the Caucasus, the wolf is a symbol of resistance to Russian rule.
Alikshan Pliyev’s mother, Leila Pliyeva, a white-haired medical technician at a government health clinic, said she was baffled by her son’s abduction. He could not be a religious militant, she said, because unlike most other youths here he never attended mosque.
As is the case with most disappearances, police and government officials told her that they had no idea what happened to her son. But she said she is sure that government forces were responsible. “It can only be the special services,” she said sadly.
Her son could be among the lucky ones who are eventually freed, she says, sounding as though she is trying to persuade herself.
“I have hope,” Pliyeva said, as tears welled in her eyes. “But do you see how it is with us?”
TITLE: Taliban Militants Attack Afghan Capital; 5 Killed
AUTHOR: By Amir Shah
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL — Taliban militants struck in the heart of the Afghan capital Monday, launching suicide attacks on key government targets in a clear sign the insurgents plan to escalate their fight as the U.S. and its allies ramp up a campaign to end the war. At least five bystanders and security forces were killed and nearly 40 wounded, officials said.
The Defense Ministry said seven attackers had also been killed in the brazen attack, which occurred 10 days before a major international conference in London on ways to shore up the Afghan government to confront the growing Taliban threat.
After a series of blasts and more than three hours of subsequent gunfights outside several ministries and inside a shopping mall, President Hamid Karzai said security had been restored to the capital, though search operations continued amid reports that more attackers were hiding in the city.
It was the biggest assault on the capital since Oct. 28 when gunmen with automatic weapons and suicide vests stormed a guest house used by UN staff, killing at least 11 people including three UN staff.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said that 20 armed militants, including some with suicide vests, had entered Kabul to target the presidential palace and other government buildings in the center of the capital.
Explosions and heavy machine-gun fire rattled the city for hours. Debris was strewn on the streets, which were quickly abandoned by crowds that normally fill the area. Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said a child and a policeman were killed. The Ministry of Public Health later said five people — a civilian and four security forces — were killed and 30 others wounded.
The attack unfolded as Cabinet members were being sworn in by Karzai despite the rejection by parliament of the majority of his choices. Presidential spokesman, Waheed Omar, said the ceremony had occurred as scheduled, and everybody in the palace was safe.
“As we were conducting the ceremony to swear in the Cabinet, a terrorist attack was going in an area of Kabul close to the presidential palace,” Karzai told reporters. “This is just one of the dangers.”
Militants have become increasingly brazen in challenging Afghan and international forces as the U.S. and NATO allies begin sending 37,000 more troops to join the fight.
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the Taliban behind the attack were part of a set of extremist groups operating in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“They are desperate people; they are ruthless,” he said from New Delhi after a trip to Afghanistan. “The people who are doing this certainly will not survive the attack, nor will they succeed. But we can expect these sort of things on a regular basis.”
The first blast was heard shortly before 10 a.m. in an area where government buildings are concentrated, including the presidential palace, the central bank and the luxury Serana Hotel, which is frequented by Westerners.
Azimi said a rocket slammed into the street near the bank’s gate, but there were conflicting reports that the area had been struck by a suicide bomber or grenades.
Mohib Safi, the bank’s deputy governor, said employees heard a strong explosion followed by gunfire. He said employees were safely inside and that no militants had entered the building.
Police sealed off a large area in the center of Kabul as the clash of machine-gun fire echoed through the mountain-rimmed city. Helicopters buzzed overhead. A car that exploded between a shopping center and the Ministry of Education burned in the street.
Fighting raged for more than three hours and one four-story shopping center near the Justice Ministry was engulfed in flames after a group of militants entered the building, throwing grenades inside to frighten shoppers, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Zemari Bashary.
Two suicide bombers later detonated their explosives and Afghan troops killed two other militants in the mall, Bashary said. He said other militants were holed up on the top floor, but officials later said the building had been cleared.
Afghan parliamentarian Daoud Sultanzai told the British Broadcasting Corp. by telephone that some of the militants had hijacked an ambulance and used it in one of the attacks. He did not say how he obtained that information.
NATO, which said international forces worked with Afghan forces to areas of the capital, said Afghan troops had killed at least two armed insurgents while clearing a building at a shopping center.
Elsewhere in the capital, Afghan troops also surrounded an area housing a well-known cinema and opened fire on militants believed hiding inside. A police officer at the site, Ghulam Ghaus, said the fighting ended after the last suicide attacker inside blew himself up. It wasn’t clear how many others were in the building.
TITLE: American Detainees Allege
Torture
AUTHOR: By Asif Shahzad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SARGODHA, Pakistan — Five Americans arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorism told a court Monday that they had been tortured by police — charges that could add to political sensitivities surrounding the case.
The men made the allegations during a hearing before a special anti-terrorism court in Sargodha. The session was held in order for police to submit a charge sheet alleging that the suspects had conspired in a terrorist act, a formal legal step that brings them closer to a possible indictment.
The men also shouted the allegations to reporters as they were driven from the building. No details as to the nature of the alleged torture were given.
Prison authorities and police denied any ill-treatment. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said he had no immediate comment about the torture allegations, but noted consular officials have visited the men.
The five men, all young Muslims from the Washington area, were detained in December at a house in the Punjabi town of Sargodha not long after arriving in Pakistan.
Police have publicly accused them of plotting terror attacks in Pakistan, having links to al-Qaida and seeking to join militants fighting U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan after contacting Pakistani militants on the Internet. Lawyers for the men say they wanted to travel to Afghanistan and had no plans for attacks in Pakistan.
The case comes amid strong anti-American sentiment in Pakistan among the public, media and government, and could become an irritant between the two nations, especially if there are suspicions that they are being mistreated or their trial is unfair.
The judicial process in Pakistan is prone to corruption and pressure by powerful interests, and terrorism trials take place behind closed doors. Allegations of mistreatment of prisoners are commonly heard.
The media and the public were not allowed to attend the court session, but a court order obtained by The Associated Press said the men “have made a complaint that they have been tortured in the custody of police.” It instructed the men to undergo medical examinations.
Later, reporters heard several of the men shout three times in unison, “We are being tortured,” as they were driven from the courthouse in a prison van.
Senior police officer Usman Anwar denied the allegations, as did Aftab Haanif, the deputy superintendent of the jail where the men are being held, who said they were receiving better food than regular inmates.
“We categorically deny that we tortured them at any stage of the interrogation,” Anwar said. “The court has ordered a medical examination that will make everything clear.”
In Monday’s hearing, police submitted a charge sheet and evidence to the court in which the men are accused of violating several sections of Pakistan’s penal code and anti-terrorism law.
TITLE: EU: Somali Pirates Release Oil Supertanker
AUTHOR: By Malkhadir Muhumed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali pirates released an oil supertanker and its crew of 28 on Monday after a rival group attacked the hijackers in an unsuccessful attempt to steal the ransom, the European Union naval force said.
The Maran Centaurus was hijacked Nov. 29 about 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) off the Somali coast. It was carrying about 2 million barrels of crude oil from Saudi Arabia destined for the United States, estimated to be worth roughly $150 million at the time of the attack.
Commander John Harbour, the spokesman for the European Union’s anti-piracy force, said a group of rival pirates had attacked the Greek-flagged Maran Centaurus just before the ransom was being delivered, prompting the pirates onboard the tanker to call for assistance from the anti-piracy force.
Harbour said the EU naval force did not intervene but declined to give details on the actions of other warships in the area. In a statement later, the EU naval force said it dispatched a helicopter to provide any immediate medical assistance to the crew on the ship that is now under naval escort as it leaves Somali waters.
A Somali middleman, who helped negotiate for the release of the ship, says pirates collected $5.5 million Sunday afternoon and left the ship Monday morning. The middleman spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he feared reprisals.
In a statement, the ship’s owner declined to give any details about how it negotiated the release of the Maran Centaurus. The Maran Tankers Management Inc. said the crew are safe and well.
The middleman said pirates in two speedboats attacked the ship Sunday just before the ransom was due to be delivered but after a brief shootout, two helicopters from a warship intervened. The middleman said the two helicopters did not fire at any of the pirates, but only hovered over them, successfully scaring off the attacking group.
A Greek coast guard spokeswoman said the tanker had left Somalia escorted by a Greek frigate and was heading to the South African port of Durban. She said all crew members were in good health, and the ship was expected to reach Durban in a week. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with Greek government regulations.
The ship, only the second oil tanker captured by Somali pirates, had 9 Greeks, 16 Filipinos, 2 Ukrainians, and a Romanian aboard. Its seizure resurrected fears of an environmental or safety disaster first raised by the capture of the Saudi-owned Sirius Star. That hijacking was resolved in January last year with a $3 million ransom payment. It was carrying 2 million barrels of oil valued at about $100 million at the time.
The International Maritime Bureau said last week that sea attacks worldwide surged 39 percent last year to 406 cases, the highest in six years. Somali pirates raids on vessels accounted for more than half the attacks.
It said that Somali pirates were responsible for 217 of the global attacks and had seized 47 vessels. This was nearly double the 111 attacks Somali pirates launched in 2008, of which 42 were successful hijackings.
The impoverished Horn of Africa nation has not had a functioning government for 19 years and the weak UN-backed administration is too busy fighting the Islamist insurgency to arrest pirates.
TITLE: Iranian Minister Vows Revenge On Israel State
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s interior minister is vowing to take revenge on Israel over the slaying last week of a physics professor in a mysterious bomb attack.
Iranian officials have blamed an exiled opposition group, accusing it of acting on behalf of Israel and the U.S. Washington denied involvement. Israel did not comment.
Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar on Monday promised revenge on “Zionists” but did not elaborate.
The 50-year-old Tehran University professor, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, was killed when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded outside his home Jan. 12.
It remains unclear why the researcher with no prominent political voice, no published work with military relevance and no declared links to Iran’s nuclear program was targeted.