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 DRESDEN, Germany — Russian experts working by night removed a large quantity of highly enriched uranium from a Soviet-era reactor in Germany on Monday and flew it to Russia for processing. Anti-nuclear protesters forced a convoy carrying the material to stop briefly despite efforts to keep the route secret and a heavy police presence. Some 326 kilos of enriched uranium, enough for several bombs, was heading to a processing center in Podolsk, Russia from the former Rossendorf research reactor near Dresden, where the material was stored, U. |
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 MOSCOW — An estimated 70,000 Kremlin supporters donning Santa suits converged on the capital Sunday to celebrate a key World War II victory, fanning across the city to remember the fallen and honor the 25,000 veterans still alive in Moscow. |
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The State Russian Duma voted overwhelmingly on Friday to move the Constitutional Court from Moscow to St. Petersburg but amendments to the law all but render the costly relocation symbolic, critics complain. By voting to create a branch of the court in Moscow so that judges who oppose the move can continue to hear cases there, parliamentarians also secured the court’s right to organize its hearings in other cities than St. |
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Federal Security Service head Nikolai Patrushev has said foreign intelligence agents are actively spying on Russia with the help of new NATO members, Izvestia reported Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A small passenger plane blew up in midair over the Leningrad region Saturday, killing all three people on board, Interfax reported. The privately owned Yak-52 airplane was flying over a stadium in the town of Nizhniye Oselki, 25 kilometers from St. Petersburg, when the explosion occurred. Two men and a 14-year-old girl died in the accident, an unidentified official at the regional branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry told Interfax. The official said one of the victims was Igor Samylin, a senior postal official in St. Petersburg. Local postal officials confirmed that Samylin had died in the accident, Interfax reported. Nothing was known Sunday about the second man apart from his name — Viktor Popov. |
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 MOSCOW — A motley crowd of 2,500 opposition activists on Saturday descended on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad chanting “Freedom!” and “Russia without Putin!” only to be overwhelmed by riot police. |
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MOSCOW — Oleg Mitvol, the state official leading the charge against Shell-run Sakhalin-2, was threatened with disciplinary action Thursday. Yet it looked like his boss was the one in greater danger of losing his job. Sergei Sai, the head of the Natural Resource Ministry’s environmental watchdog, sent a letter to Minister Yury Trutnev seeking disciplinary action against Mitvol, his deputy. |
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Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, was born in Moscow in 1973, and the first words out of his mouth were Russian. Yet neither Russian nor the Russian market has come easily to Google. |
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Many remember Leonid Brezhnev as a mumbling dotard with dark bushy eyebrows and a cuirass of medals pinned on his broad chest. But more Russians today would rather live under Brezhnev, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, than any other Soviet or post-Soviet leader, with the exception of President Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — British detectives probing the murder of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko have wound up their investigation in Moscow and are due to leave for home on Tuesday, a British police source said on Monday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT ) — Two geese at St. Petersburg’s zoo died of bird flu on Dec. 8, Fontanka.ru reported Monday. The zoo was closed down on Monday. The zoo’s management said the closure was for routine maintenance in the run up for the New Year, it was reported. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new bridge over the River Neva is shedhuled to be completed in 4 years, Fontanka.ru reported Monday. The bridge will connect the 23rd Line of Vassilievsky Ostrov and the Admiralteisky District. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police detained a group of drug users who are suspected in a series of knife point robberies involving young children, Fontanka.ru reported Monday. The robberies have targeted young mothers whose children are threatened with knives until money, mobile phones and other possessions are handed over. |
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MOSCOW — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said after Friday’s talks with President Vladimir Putin that they had found a common approach to fuel prices for Belarus but skipped a joint dinner with his Russian counterpart. Belarus’ economy faces a huge jolt in January, when Russia has said it will remove the country’s exemption from oil export duties and hike the price for gas supplies to European levels. |
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MOSCOW — The flashy, neon lights of Moscow and St. Petersburg’s casinos are expected to go out now that the State Duma has tentatively approved the creation of four gambling regions outside the two cities. |
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BRUSSELS — The European Union stood firm Friday in the face of Russian threats to ban the bloc’s meat exports next year over health worries and bypass Brussels by seeking separate deals with individual countries. The likelihood of a temporary ban on EU meat products in Russia from Jan. |
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MOSCOW — Democracy in all its messy manifestations appeared in the unlikeliest of places Dec.14 — at a conference to provide a platform for victims of apartment fraud to air their grievances with a number of government officials, including Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov and Public Chamber representative Anatoly Kucherena. |
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In Soviet times, Bulgaria was a cheap, if not always cheerful, option for Russian tourists looking for a seaside vacation. Decades later, the country’s improved infrastructure and potential European Union membership, all amid a familiar Slavic setting, is tempting Russians to invest in Bulgarian property. |
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Goodbye, steep charges for calling abroad. Farewell, calls limited to a few snatched minutes. Hello, Internet telephony. A raft of computer programs — Skype is the current darling — enable you to make free international calls between computers with Internet connections. |
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Telecoms firm Comstar said last Tuesday that it had bought a blocking stake of 25 percent plus one share in Svyazinvest, the main player in fixed-line telephony in the country, for $1.3 billion, confirming what some banking sources had said the day before. |
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BRASILIA, Brazil — Russia agreed to provide Brazil with rocket fuel and space technology on Thursday as part of a broader effort to increase political ties and trade in products including aircraft and beef. |
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A real manager should be a performer, an administrator, an entrepreneur and an integrator at the same time, and overemphasize different roles in different stages of a company’s life, according to Ichak Adizes, professor of Stanford University and the Management School of California University. He explained this PAEI-theory in “Corporate Lifecycles,” a book that is something of a bible for many managers and for many more management consultants. Recently, it was even translated into Russian. But I’m not sure it is popular among Russian top-managers, many of whom also double as owners of their businesses. Many of them do not like reading, preferring to act. |
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 You have to admire the perseverance of Western energy investors in Russia, whom no amount of suspicious deaths, arbitrary contract abrogation or naked shakedowns can discourage. |
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In the early 1980s, being one of very few native Russian speakers in Princeton, New Jersey, I became friends with an emigre couple, the Gurfinkels. While the husband was working on his Ph.D., the wife, Natasha, gave up ancient history to enter a bank-training program. |
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NIZHNEVARTOVSK, Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District — It looked, at first, like a group of vegetarians touring a fish market. On a tour of the Nizhnevartovsk power station put on for Germany’s E. |
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SOFIA, Bulgaria — Bulgaria’s ruling coalition government has agreed on a new deal with Gazprom that will raise the price state gas monopoly Bulgargaz currently pays by between 40 percent and 45 percent through 2012, a source said Friday. The source said that under the deal, which will be valid until 2030, state-run monopoly Gazprom will stop its practice of paying for gas it transits through Bulgaria by selling Sofia supplies at a discount far below market prices. |
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MOSCOW — All good things must eventually end, and so it was last week for the 14-day run of positive numbers on Russian markets, which analysts said could now expect to be less liquid and more volatile as the holiday season begins. On Tuesday, the RTS was down 0. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting a monopoly on weapons exports to Rosoboronexport, the state arms agency run by his longtime ally and former fellow spy Sergei Chemezov, Kommersant said Friday. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mosenergo, the main electricity and heat supplier in Moscow, had its back tax bill for 2002 and 2003 slashed to $53 million, RIA-Novosti said Friday, citing a tax official who was not identified. Mosenergo’s bill was lowered 80 percent to 1. |
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VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Poland’s PKN Orlen on Friday bought a 30.7 percent stake in the Mazeikiu Nafta oil refinery from the Lithuanian government for $852 million, gaining control of the Baltic country’s biggest enterprise. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Private equity investor Baring Vostok Capital Partners bought a “substantial” stake in Bank Caspian to tap a lending boom in Kazakhstan. Bank Caspian is “a leading retail bank in Kazakhstan,” the Russian company said in a statement Friday, without saying how much it paid or the size of its stake. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian Aluminum opened the first aluminum plant built in the country since the Soviet era as Oleg Deripaska expands the company into the world’s biggest maker of the metal. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Iran will start shipping gas through a pipeline to Armenia in January, the Tehran Times reported Sunday, citing an Iranian official. About 1 million cubic meters of natural gas will be shipped daily through the 160-kilometer pipeline, said Mohammad-Reza Akbari, the managing director of Payandan, the company operating the pipeline. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel, owner of the country’s largest steel mill, plans to sell 1.45 billion new shares, as the company prepares its listing. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — LUKoil, the country’s largest oil company, may build oil refineries in Vietnam, Interfax reported, citing CEO Vagit Alekperov. The Vietnamese government wants to build “two or three” refineries and asked LUKoil to participate in the projects during a recent visit to the country by company officials, Alekperov said, Interfax reported Friday. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom, the country’s sole exporter of natural gas, is in talks with Ukraine on boosting shipments of the fuel to western Europe via Ukraine’s pipeline network, one year after cutting supplies over a price dispute. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Severstal, the steelmaker owned by billionaire Alexei Mordashov, elected a new board of directors that includes five “independents.” Chris Clark, Martin Angle, Rolf Stomberg, Ron Freeman and Peter Kraljic will join the board, the company said Friday in a statement. Clark, a former Johnson Matthey manager for 40 years, was elected chairman, the statement said. |
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 The late arrival of freezing temperatures this year represents only a temporary respite for the more than 1 million homeless people who face the problem of how to survive until the spring. Although a couple of events in the fall helped raise the profile of the homelessness problem, the issue rarely garners much official attention. |
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Whoever said that political life in Russia is bland, that there are no interesting political blocs or battles between them? I actually think that there are lots of interesting conflicts to follow — you just have to go looking somewhere other than the State Duma to find them. |
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It’s a case stranger than fiction. Or is it? As the investigation into the poisoning death of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko continues, CIA-agent-turned-novelist Charles McCarry imagines a retired Stalin-era spy reminiscing about actual KGB assassinations, and yearning for the golden age of espionage — when things were done right. |
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 RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday he would press on with early elections as a truce between his security forces and the Hamas government came under strain in the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian security source said Interior Ministry police had briefly exchanged fire with Abbas’s presidential guard near the Foreign Ministry in Gaza. |
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HAVANA — Fidel Castro is not terminally ill and will make a public appearance shortly, but is unlikely to return to governing Cuba on a day-to-day basis, Cuban government officials told a visiting delegation of members of the U. |
 LONDON — Police arrested a 37-year-old man on Monday on suspicion of murdering five prostitutes in one of Britain’s most dramatic serial killings of recent times. The naked bodies of five women, who all worked as prostitutes in the town of Ipswich in eastern England, were found dumped in the countryside over a period of 11 days this month, dominating television and newspaper headlines. |
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NEW DELHI — The son of an influential member of India’s ruling Congress party was found guilty on Monday of murdering a model in 1999, in a retrial of a controversial case which has transfixed the country. |
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LONDON — Excessive drinking can damage brain cells but the brain can repair some of the harm, a team of international researchers said on Monday. But they warned alcoholics should get sober as quickly as possible because the longer they continue to drink heavily, the less likely their brains will be able to regenerate. |
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 PERTH — Australia beat England by 206 runs in the third test to regain the Ashes in record time after taking an unassailable 3-0 lead in the series on Monday. Australia wrapped up another convincing victory with the second ball after lunch on the final day when Shane Warne bowled Monty Panesar to dismiss England for 350. |
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LONDON — Performing well in the League Cup was probably not high on Andriy Shevchenko’s list of priorities when he joined Chelsea but the low-key competition has attained an unexpected importance for the struggling striker. |
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Olympic champion Yevgeny Plyushenko endured a disappointing return to action, as France’s Brian Joubert won his first Grand Prix final Saturday in St. Petersburg to establish himself as the top contender for next month’s European championship crown. South Korean teenager Kim Yu-na upset the favorites to win the women’s title for her maiden victory, whilst former world champions Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo of China signaled their return to the top by winning the pairs. |
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Issues Archive