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MOSCOW — The Russian state-run gas giant Gazprom has warned the European Union not to “politicize” terms for Russian gas supplies, implicitly threatening to sell its product elsewhere if the EU seeks to impose too many conditions on the company.
In a statement posted on its website, the company said Gazprom chief Alexei Miller held a meeting with EU ambassadors Tuesday in Moscow where a “frank and objective” conversation took place regarding Russian energy supplies to Europe.
“Gazprom was and is the main supplier of natural gas to Europe. We understand our responsibility and henceforth will remain the guarantor of energy security for European consumers,” the company said, adding there are “no doubts” that Russia has the supply and can deliver it unfailingly.
“Nevertheless, one cannot forget that we are actively developing new markets such as North America and China. |
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ICE ARMADA
Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters
A man stands on the embankment of the Neva River as ice flows past on Thursday. Temperatures in the city rose to 13 degrees Celsius on Thursday, marking the hottest day of the year so far. |
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St. Petersburg extremists struck again Wednesday in a violent hate crime that left an Indian medical student hospitalized with stab wounds in the third racist assault in a week.
An unidentified group stabbed Anjar Kishore-Kumar, 23, a fifth-year student at the Mechnikov Medical Academy at around 8 p.m. as he was making his way to his hostel on Kirillovksaya Ulitsa.
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All photos from issue.
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PreventAIDS, a new program aimed at combating the spread of HIV in the city by educating and raising awareness among vulnerable groups, run jointly by the U.S. non-profit organization Population Services International (PSI) and City Hall, was launched this week. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom’s media arm appears to be on the verge of adding to its newspaper portfolio by snapping up Komsomolskaya Pravda, the most widely read paper in the country. |
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As the tourist high season approaches, St. Petersburg is preparing a whole host of new measures to ensure its visitors are kept safe and comfortable.
The new approach will include upgraded measures of security, five new tour bus car parks and more tourist information by way of an English-speaking telephone hotline and booklets, to be distributed in a wide range of languages to all tourists on their arrival through customs. |
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The construction of Russia’s first IT park, part of a government program to develop the nation’s high-tech industry, was officially begun this week in St. |
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The fortunes of Russia’s 100 richest businessmen increased by $107 billion up to $248 billion last year, according to Forbes magazine. For the second year in a row the entrepreneur and governor of the Chukotka region Roman Abramovich was named Russia’s wealthiest person. |
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MOSCOW — Judges at Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court on Wednesday sentenced Svetlana Bakhmina, a former deputy head of Yukos’ legal department, to seven years in prison after finding her guilty of embezzlement and tax evasion. |
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MOSCOW — Metals magnate Vladimir Potanin’s Interros holding is looking to acquire mining assets in Uzbekistan and tap into the country’s vast uranium and gold reserves, an industry source said Wednesday.
Interros is considering buying out the stake of U. |
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MOSCOW — The Economic Development and Trade Ministry is expected this week to unveil the companies selected to manage Russia’s new private-public venture funds, a ministry official said Wednesday. |
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Finnish Terminals
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Containerships Ltd. Oy, a Finnish container shipping company, may build two Baltic Sea container terminals for 170 million euros ($210 million), the Vedomosti newspaper reported.
Containerships as early as this year may build a terminal in the Primorsk port with a capacity to ship 500,000 containers a year, the newspaper said, citing Grigory Dvas, the vice-governor of the Leningrad region, where the terminals will be located. |
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The Rambouillet Declaration of 1975 defines what would become the Group of Eight as the club of the largest, industrially developed, democratic countries of the world. This definition is reasserted in the traditional communiques produced at each of the annual summits.
The organization’s 30-plus years of existence have confirmed the criteria required for membership: a democratic political regime; a large economy; a high level of economic and institutional development; a convertible national currency; membership in the WTO, OECD and IEA; and dedication to the goals and principles of international cooperation. |
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This week saw the release of a debut novel, “April Fool’s Day,” by a contemporary American author of Yugoslavian origin, Josip Novakovich.
The author, currently residing in St. Petersburg, is a guest of St. Petersburg State University on a Fulbright fellowship, and on Tuesday, he gave a lecture at the American Corner Library, presenting the book and talking about fiction writing in general.
He also travelled to Murmansk and plans to travel to Archangelsk with even more lectures for literary students.
Though few East-European titles are published on the Russian fiction market, some authors from the former Soviet block have managed to carve out a niche, Milorad Pavic and Milan Kundera being just two notable examples. |
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 The main event this weekend is St. Petersburg’s largest left-field music festival, SKIF, or the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, dedicated to the local musician who died in 1996. |
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Nazi terror continued this week as one more anti-fascist punk activist was killed in a neo-Nazi-style attack strikingly similar to the killing of Timur Kacharava, the 20-year-old student, anti-Nazi activist and member of punk bands Sandinista! and Distress, who was stabbed to death in St. Petersburg in November.
21-year-old Alexander Ryukhin, a third-year student at the Moscow Electronics and Mathematics Institute, was attacked by a group of six to eight neo-Nazis near the Domodedovskaya metro station in Moscow as he was heading to a punk concert on Sunday.
Local musical events this week are somewhat overshadowed by the SKIF10 festival that will run through Sunday, but some of the foreign acts taking part in SKIF can be caught at local clubs as well. |
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 David McVicar directs an eerie new production at the Mariinsky, with Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of the Henry James classic novella “The Turn of the Screw. |
 The war on the Eastern Front remains largely “undiscovered country” for the Western reader despite the fact that the Red Army was responsible for nearly 75 percent of German military losses, including soldiers killed in battle, wounded, taken prisoner and otherwise unaccounted for. The best guide to this terrain is Vasily Grossman, who spent over 1,000 days at the front as a combat correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, the Soviet Army newspaper. |
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TOKYO — With straps loaded with tamagotchis around their necks, siblings Takumi and Ayaka Mochizuki travelled an hour to a Tokyo store so their virtual pets could interact with a giant tamagotchi that was on tour.
“I love feeding my tamagotchi,” said Takumi, 5, looking disappointed because he didn’t have enough virtual money to buy anything for his “3-year-old” pet at the royal market, which is accessible only via the giant tamagotchi. |
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Gitmo List Released
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. government released the most extensive list yet of the hundreds of detainees who have been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison — nearly all labeled enemy combatants, but only a handful of whom have faced formal charges. |
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NEW DELHI -— Sergei Bubka, the greatest pole vaulter of all time, has tennis on his mind these days.
The legendary athlete’s son, named Sergei Bubka Junior, prefers tennis after a brief flirtation with pole vault and is now a regular on the ATP’s second-string Challenger circuit. |
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Golden Ball Final
BERLIN (Reuters) — A golden ball will be used at the World Cup final on July 9, organizing committee president Franz Beckenbauer said on Tuesday. |
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LONDON — Russia could not have a harder start to the defense of their Fed Cup title than this weekend’s tie in Liege against a Belgian team featuring Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne.
U.S. Open champion Clijsters, the world number two, and French Open champion Henin-Hardenne, ranked four, are competing together in the team event for the first time since July 2003. |
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ROME, Georgia — Discovery Channel’s rising young Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych won the second stage of the Tour of Georgia and seized the overall lead in the six-day race. |
Temp: -2°C overcast 
Issues Archive