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Yabloko, the only major political party represented in St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly that opposes the policies of City Hall, has been excluded from upcoming elections to the assembly amid claims that City Hall is forcing its most vocal critic out of the political arena. The nominally independent St. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Police on Friday detained a group of opposition activists at a Moscow airport on suspicion of exploding a small bomb earlier in the day at Moscow State University, a spokesman for the unregistered National Bolshevik Party said. The bomb exploded in the early hours of Friday in a university dormitory. |
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The latest addition to St. Petersburg’s ski resort map will shortly complete $20 million worth of development that will allow it to become “the first year-round [ski] resort complex [in the region],” managers said Friday speaking during a news conference. |
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MOSCOW — Russia expects the United States to explain its growing military presence in the Middle East when the countries next meet to discuss the region, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Saturday. “I have seen no change in Washington’s fairly aggressive rhetoric,” Lavrov said. |
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MOSCOW — British prosecutors will request the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, who has been described as the chief suspect in the killing of former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko, a British newspaper reported Friday. |
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Contract Killing MOSCOW (AP) — The Moscow City Court on Friday convicted a Russian man of murdering a pregnant woman in Switzerland in what prosecutors said was a contract killing that went awry, and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The court found Alexander Bakayev guilty of killing Flavia Bertozzi, the wife of a Swiss border guard, at their home in the Swiss town of Ponte Capriasca in 2002, court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said. |
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 Quality was the name of the game at the Nordic Travel Fair, Matka, held at the Helsinki Fair Center Jan 19-21, as Finland seeks to take advantage of the booming business of international tourism, offering valuable lessons to St. Petersburg in the process. |
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MOSCOW — ESN, an investment firm with close links to Gazprom, stepped forward Friday as the first candidate to bid in the upcoming auctions for Yukos assets. |
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Lukoil Shares MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Three managers at Lukoil, Russia’s biggest oil producer, sold shares on Jan. 24 for 242 million rubles ($9.1 million) that they got in an employee share plan in 2003. Chief Accountant Lyubov Khoba sold 40,000 shares for almost 93 million rubles, Moscow-based Lukoil said in a Regulatory News Service statement Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom has offered possible contract work on its huge Shtokman project to the five companies that previously bid unsuccessfully for a stake in the scheme, it said Friday. |
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DAVOS, Switzerland — Talks with Georgia, the only country still refusing to sign a bilateral deal with Russia on its accession to the World Trade Organization, have been encouraging, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Friday. “We have not disposed of all claims,” Gref said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have conducted quite positive negotiations and outlined prospects to make our positions closer. We see obvious progress.” Russia will work hard to join the WTO this year, Gref said. The WTO talks between Russia and Georgia are now stuck on just one issue, the Russian customs checkpoints in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a spokeswoman for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry said Friday. |
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 When the inaugural Sky Express flight took off from Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport for Sochi last Monday afternoon, the low-cost airline phenomenon familiar in Europe and the United States finally came to Russia. |
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The drawn out New Year holidays might have sent business into a kind of lethargy, but new ambitious projects and deals are on their way. Local experts are confident that this year will be another productive one for entrepreneurs and investors. Boom in development Commercial real estate is thriving thanks to ever-increasing investments into the local economy. |
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There is a popular saying in Russia: “The way you meet the New Year is the way you’ll spend it.” Nobody knows if this is particularly true but involuntarily we always base all sorts of forecasts on particular events that happen at the beginning of the year. |
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 Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenbashi the Great, dictator of Turkmenistan, is dead. The political class of this remote Central Asian republic has rallied round his look-alike successor. Long Live Turkmenbashi! At first glance, there seems to be little for the outside world to cheer in the trajectory of politics in Turkmenistan, or for that matter the other Central Asian “stans”: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. |
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In anticipation of a wave of land privatization with buyout costs in excess of 4 billion euros ($5 billion) in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the government has introduced a new tax regime for the purchase of state land. |
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 In all the best horror movies the baddie has an uncanny ability to survive certain death — again and again. The same could be said of the European Constitution, which received a mortal blow when French and Dutch voters rejected it in 2005 and was placed in cold storage by the British, Austrian and Finnish presidencies. |
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Your husband hasn’t been issued a visa,” the travel agent told my wife, who along with our daughter had received a visa for the New Year’s holiday we had planned in Latvia. |
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Russia has entered the latest dramatic period in its history, with two major elections scheduled over the next year and a half. The election for the State Duma is slated for this December and the presidential vote for March 2008, which will choose the successor to President Vladimir Putin, whose second term expires next year. |
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To whom does James Fleming owe his literary allegiance? Bloodlines link Fleming to a noted writer: Ian Fleming, creator of that deathless adventurer on the high seas of governmental espionage, James Bond. On the basis of his latest novel, though, Fleming appears to share less with his Uncle Ian than with another notable: Vladimir Nabokov. |
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Given the news of Ilya Kormiltsev’s illness, the timing of the announcement about Ultra Kultura seems especially malicious. Last Monday, two messages appeared simultaneously on the web site of the Ultra Kultura publishing house. |
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DAVOS, Switzerland — St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said her priority this year would be to attract high-tech companies in an attempt to make her city the country’s technology and automotive capital. Matviyenko, speaking in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Friday, also said she had no desire to succeed President Vladimir Putin in elections next year. “We have a new automotive cluster, and we think that the next cluster in St. Petersburg will be high technology,” Matviyenko said. Matviyenko said the creation of a free economic zone and IT parks were aimed at winning over large foreign IT companies. |
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/ Reuters
Swiss Defense Minister Samuel Schmid ® shakes hands with a Swiss army soldier during his visit to an army post protecting VIP guests at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Saturday. |
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DAVOS, Switzerland — Ernst & Young CEO James Turley didn’t mince words when he took the microphone at the World Economic Forum. “I think the question that is on everyone’s minds out here is: ‘Is Russia reliable?’” he told a packed hall of about 1,000 people who had showed up Saturday to get the lowdown on Russia. The answer provided by Turley and a parade of other business executives and Russian politicians was a resounding yes.
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DAVOS, Switzerland — Some 300 people crowded into a hotel restaurant on Friday for borshch and the chance to hear Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych make his case for his country’s membership in the European Union. But EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn and Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga offered only lukewarm responses during a round of speeches that lasted for about two hours. |
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DAVOS, Switzerland — Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev brushed off talk of his presidential ambitions this week, smiling modestly for the cameras and saying he loves his current job. |
 DAVOS, Switzerland — Governments in rich countries that promised to help Africa fight poverty and disease should come good on their offers of cash, rock star and activist Bono said. Bono is a regular on the world business and aid circuit, campaigning for richer countries to forgive African nations’ debt and help fund their future. |
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PCs to Replace TVs DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) — The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday. |
 EILAT, Israel — Palestinian militant groups carried out their first suicide bombing in Israel in nine months, killing 3 people in the resort of Eilat on Monday. The Eilat blast came four days before the “Quartet” of Middle East peacemakers was to meet in Washington as part of a bid to revive Israeli-Palestinian talks. |
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 A one-sided defeat to Serena Williams in the Australian Open final is neither here nor there to Maria Sharapova — the Russian still deserves to be world number one. “The rankings don’t lie,” the 19-year-old told Reuters ahead of this week’s Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo. |
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The idea came to St. Petersburg Deputy Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov after he had knocked back a few malted beverages. Vakhmistrov, who heads up construction in the city, was on hand in Germany recently to watch a soccer game between two teams sponsored by state natural gas monopoly Gazprom: Zenit from St. |
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