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Human error was the cause of a Pulkovo plane crash in eastern Ukraine on Aug. 22, 2006 that killed all 170 people on board, Russia’s Aviation Committee announced on Saturday. The committee stopped short of naming those responsible in person. Prosecutor General’s office is still investigating the accident. An unexperienced trainee pilot was in the co-pilot’s seat during the flight from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg when it crashed outside the village of Sukhaya Balka, near the industrial city of Donetsk. The plane departed Anapa at about 3:05 p.m and soon encountered strong winds, rain and lightning. |
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SHROVETIDE SHINDIG
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Revelers taking part in a special Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) celebration organized by the Yusupov Palace on Saturday, with an effigy of Lady Maslenitsa being symbolically burnt. |
 Six people, including two children, were injured Sunday by a blast after what the police believe was a device filled with explosives went off under a table in a McDonald’s restaurant on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Ulitsa Rubinshteina at around 8.15 p.m. One of those hurt was a 38-year-old German tourist. No one was seriously injured and five had been released from hospital on Monday.
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MOSCOW — The appointment of a former furniture store manager and tax collector to the post of defense minister may help bring the military’s books in order but will not boost its overall preparedness, military analysts say. President Vladimir Putin’s decision Thursday to tap Federal Tax Service chief Anatoly Serdyukov to head the country’s million-strong military created an uproar among many military personnel. |
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MOSCOW — By promoting Sergei Ivanov to the post of first deputy prime minister, President Vladimir Putin seeks to narrow the gap in the race between the two major candidates to succeed him, political analysts said. |
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Supporters of the opposition Yabloko party blocked the city’s main thoroughfare on Sunday to protest its removal from the ballot in the upcoming city council election. Yabloko was stricken from the ballot for the March 11 election to the Legislative Assembly after municipal election officials found irregularities in the party’s registration documents. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The pro-Kremlin party United Russia on Friday appeared to throw its support behind Chechnya’s acting president, Ramzan Kadyrov, who assumed the post last week and must get parliamentary approval before becoming the republic’s full-fledged president. Political analysts said Kadyrov’s ascendancy from prime minister to the top job, replacing President Alu Alkhanov, could backfire for the Kremlin. Dmitry Kozak, Putin’s envoy to the region, will travel to Chechnya next week and propose potential successors to Alkhanov within the next 10 days, his spokesman, Fyodor Shcherbakov, said. |
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GETTING A LEG UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Visitors to the city posing for a photograph on the Strelka of Vasilievsky Island last week, with the Winter Palace in the background on the opposite side of the Neva River. |
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MOSCOW — An avian flu outbreak in the Moscow region over the weekend has been traced to a single market, a senior official said Sunday. The four cases of dead poultry involved birds that had been bought at a market located in southwest Moscow, Alexei Alexeyenko, a spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry’s animal and plant inspection agency, told The Associated Press.
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2 Uzbeks Die in Brawl MOSCOW (AP) — Two Uzbeks were killed in a brawl in a town outside St. Petersburg on Friday. The victims died of apparent knife wounds suffered in a fight in the town of Pushkin, Itar-Tass reported, citing police. Interfax said that the fight involved more than eight other people but that their identities had not yet been established because they dispersed before police arrived. Bureaucrat Gets 6 Years MOSCOW (AP) — A Moscow court late last week sentenced Alexander Tugushev, a former deputy head of the Fishing Committee, to six years in prison for taking a $3.7 million bribe, news agencies reported. Prosecutors said Tugushev accepted the bribe from a businessman in exchange for a promise to allocate fishing quotas to his company. |
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 MOSCOW — At the recent menswear shows in Milan, Denis Simachev, a rising star of Russian fashion, showed a collection that focused on the country’s antiheroes, telling a story of bare-knuckled thugs working casinos in what he called “badly put together gangster wear. |
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St. Petersburg-based software outsourcing company StarSoft Development Labs has announced its merger with one of the largest IT service providers in Central and Eastern Europe — Exigen Services. The companies aim to increase competitiveness by combining their centers of development in the EU and CIS and uniting efforts for better promotion of IT services, they said last week in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — The book will close on Tuesday on Sberbank’s share sale, ending a 20-day rollercoaster ride that has been marked by PR fumbles, state interference and widespread investor confusion. |
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Swedish construction concern Skanska is quitting the Russian construction market on mounting financial losses, Interfax reported Monday citing the Dagens Industri newspaper. Skanska “lost dozens of millions of Sweden Kronors” in Russia, Peter Gimbe, senior vice president for corporate communications at Skanska AB, told Dagens Industri. |
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MOSCOW — The Transportation Ministry said Friday that it had banned nine carriers from flying charter flights to the European Union, including UTAir and units of LUKoil and Gazprom. |
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Polyus Rumors LONDON (Reuters) — A source close to Polyus Gold denied on Sunday a newspaper report that Russia’s top gold miner had approached Anglo American to buy a stake in Anglo Gold Ashanti. “It’s total nonsense,” the source close to the company said. |
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MOSCOW — Sergei Naryshkin’s promotion to deputy prime minister promises to strengthen Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov’s position in the Cabinet at the expense of liberal ministers, analysts said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Industrial output soared well above expectations in January, helped by unusually warm weather, according to data Friday that could help break down domestic resistance to the strengthening of the ruble. Output rose 8.4 percent year on year, compared with a 3. |
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MOSCOW — Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Friday that the merger of Gazprom and coal company SUEK was bad for competition, echoing criticism of the deal by UES chief Anatoly Chubais. |
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MOSCOW — Russia will not allow Finnish energy firm Fortum to take control of power firm TGK-1 for strategic reasons as it serves St Petersburg, analysts said Friday. They said the management of Unified Energy Systems, which is being dismantled as part of power sector reforms, made the comments on Fortum during a meeting with analysts late last week. |
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SOCHI — Electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems on Saturday signed an 83.6 billion ruble ($3.2 billion) deal to expand the energy network in the southern region of Krasnodar over the next five years. |
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MTV Stake MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Troika Capital Partners, a Russian investment management fund, may buy a 40 percent stake in MTV Russia, Kommersant reported Monday, citing an unidentified person close to negotiations. Troika Capital may buy the stake from Russia Partners and is in talks with Viacom Inc., the owner of a 54 percent stake in MTV Russia, on the joint development of television, music and other media projects in the country, the Russian daily said. New Skodas PRAGUE (Bloomberg) — Skoda Auto AS, the Czech unit of Volkswagen AG, is considering producing a cheap small car for the Indian, Chinese and Russian markets, Hospodarske Noviny reported. |
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 The last time Owen Kemp sat down for an interview, the reporter whipped out his breakfast and started tucking in. “He had a hard-boiled egg. I thought, ‘You must be joking!’” said Kemp, vice president for Hewlett-Packard in Russia. |
 MOSCOW — When a Gazprom-led consortium begins laying the foundation for a major new pipeline to pump Russian gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Western Europe, it is likely to run into problems — thousands of them. The North European Gas Pipeline, or Nord Stream, is due to snake along the seabed over an area covered with hundreds of thousands of unexploded mines and munitions dating as far back as World War I. |
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Managers at “Ford Motor Russia” will never forget St. Valentine’s Day 2007. On midnight last Wednesday its factory, Russia’s first foreign car-assembly plant, halted production for 24 hours. The workers had given two weeks’ notice of their action. Up until the very last minute Ford’s management tried everything in their power to avoid the strike, which according to experts immediately reduced the factory’s revenues by $3 to 4 million. |
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A pivotal 12 months lies ahead for Russian politics. According to the Constitution, President Vladimir Putin has to leave office at the end of his second term, in March 2008, and he has maneuvered himself into a lose-lose situation. |
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A mere two months after the official publication of the notorious Information letter of the Supreme Arbitration Court on unfair tax benefits (for more details please see the article published in St. Petersburg Times on December 26, 2007), another supreme court (this time, the RF Supreme court) has issued an Instructive Ruling on how to deal with tax crimes. |
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In 1992, I witnessed an extraordinary street scene in Dresden. Although Germany had already been reunified for a while, Russian troops were still lingering on in the east — mainly because they had nowhere else to go. A Russian Army truck was driving in busy downtown traffic. Suddenly, it pulled up to the curb and a soldier got out. He walked over to the line of trees planted between the roadway and the sidewalk and began to urinate — but not before looking up and down the street to make sure the coast was clear. The street was far from empty. It was crowded with shoppers, parents with their children and elderly people, but their presence didn’t seem to register. |
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 It was funny, in a grim sort of way. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates responded to President Vladimir Putin’s polemic attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a “less complex time” and saying he was “almost nostalgic” for its return. |
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In many countries, being moved from defense minister to first deputy prime minister might sound like a demotion. Logic suggests that this is even more the case in Russia, where the defense minister is one of the few Cabinet members who reports directly to the president. |
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Lyudmila Kostina was denied entry to a Samara nightclub on Feb. 5 because she is confined to a wheelchair. In places like the Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Novosibirsk regions, stocks of Cyclodol — a medicine needed by people with psychiatric and serious nervous disorders — have nearly run out. |
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Was President Vladimir Putin’s unexpected shuffle of his Cabinet on Thursday somehow connected with his shocking speech at a security conference in Munich on Feb. 10? It seems likely. It is difficult to follow the thinking of a president who seems to value secrecy above all else when making decisions. |
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Last week, The New York Times reviewed the debut novel by a young horror writer named Joe Hill, and quite matter-of-factly mentioned that “it would be much easier to compare Mr. Hill’s work to Stephen King’s if Stephen King were not his actual father.” Russian media outlets reported this as if a huge secret had been revealed. In fact, Variety had said it loud and clear almost a year ago, and one of Hill’s colleagues had noted in his blog that it was “the worst-kept secret” in the industry. In any case, this doesn’t seem like a case of publishing-world nepotism; Hill’s talent as a horror writer appears to be genuine. Unlike acting, writing doesn’t seem to be a family thing, perhaps because it’s too personal. |
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 The controversial postmodernist Vladimir Sorokin has struck through the language barrier again in a crystalline English translation by Jamey Gambrell of his unnerving novel “Ice. |
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 LONDON — London’s congestion charge zone, already the world’s biggest, nearly doubled in size on Monday, despite objections from businesses and a national campaign against road tolls. The original zone in central London will now extend westwards to take in some of the capital’s most exclusive areas like Chelsea, Kensington and Notting Hill. |
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CANBERRA — Australia will press U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney this week to ensure a speedy trial for Australia’s Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks so he can be brought home by the year’s end, said Prime Minister John Howard. |
 JERUSALEM — Israeli-Palestinian talks hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ended on Monday with a vague promise to meet again and little sign of progress on reviving peace moves. The talks, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, were overshadowed by a Palestinian unity deal that calmed factional fighting but cast a new cloud over prospects for peace with Israel. |
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WASHINGTON — Pop star Britney Spears got ready for the weekend by shearing all her hair off and dropping by a Los Angeles tattoo parlor, where she quickly drew a crowd. |
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WASHINGTON — In the Lincoln Bedroom, President George W. Bush likes to show off one of the most treasured historical artifacts in the White House, a handwritten copy of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. The building’s walls speak of past battles, victories, defeats, heartache. President George Washington’s portrait hangs in the Oval Office. |
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 ARE, Sweden — Austria topped the medals table on the final day of what could otherwise be seen as a disappointing campaign for the alpine superpowers at the world ski championships. Only a victory in the nations event, after Mario Matt had won well-deserved slalom gold to add to Nicole Hosp’s giant slalom win managed to soothe their concerns over having to rebuild for the next Olympics. The Canadian city of Vancouver will host the 2010 Games and Austria, who won 14 of the 30 medals in Italy last year, may have to consider the likely retirements of speed specialists Hermann Maier and Fritz Strobl. |
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 LAS VEGAS — Kobe Bryant scored 31 points to capture his second MVP award and lead the West to a 153-132 victory over the East in the NBA All-Star game on Sunday. |
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SAN JOSE, California — Andy Murray pinpointed his battling qualities as the key factor in his 6-7 6-4 7-6 win over Ivo Karlovic in the final of the San Jose Open on Sunday. The 19-year-old Scot had to come from a set down, and a break down in the second set, to win his second ATP Tour title in a battle lasting more than two and a half hours. |
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As a delegation from the International Olympic Committee was due to visit the southern Russian city of Sochi to evaluate its bid to hold the 2014 Winter Games, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said that St. |
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LONDON — Premier League champions Chelsea recorded a pre-tax loss of 80.2 million pounds in the 2005/06 financial year, the club announced on Monday. The loss is a cut of 60 million on the previous year and lower than the 87.8 million pounds Chelsea lost in 2003/04, the first of owner Roman Abramovich’s ownership. |
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