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MOSCOW — Rosneft extended its reach over the dismantled Yukos empire on Tuesday, winning back a block of its own shares in the first of a series of auctions to sell off the remains of the bankrupted oil firm. It took 10 bids and 10 minutes for Rosneft’s newly formed subsidiary RN-Razvitiye to cast the winning offer against a subsidiary of TNK-BP, its sole competitor for the stake. The state-controlled firm won the lot, which included the 9.44 percent Rosneft stake held by Yukos, for 197.84 billion rubles ($7.6 billion) — a fraction above the discounted starting price of 195.5 billion rubles ($7.5 billion). “We are entirely happy with the results of today’s auction,” Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov said. |
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 KAZAN — Chinese President Hu Jintao toured a plant that makes one of Russia’s most-advanced helicopters and got a crash course on Tatarstan’s oil as he wrapped up a multibillion-dollar visit Wednesday. |
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A new TV channel broadcasting cartoons will be launched in St. Petersburg on Sunday aiming to cater to a growing category of viewers known as “kidults” — adults that refuse to grow-up — the channel’s owner said on Thursday. Prof-Media also announced that the channel, known as 2x2, will broadcast locally on the Rambler TV frequency. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A Karelian court on Tuesday convicted two men for their role in a fight that led to ethnic riots in the town of Kondopoga last year and sentenced them to prison terms. The Kondopoga City Court convicted Sergei Mozgalev and Yury Pliyev of hooliganism for attacking an Azeri bartender in the town’s Chaika restaurant in August, Interfax reported. Mozgalev, who was also convicted of battery, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, while Pliyev received eight months. Prosecutors had asked that Mozgalev and Pliyev be sentenced to five and 2 1/2 years, respectively. Mozgalev plans to appeal. But Pliyev’s lawyer, Valery Cherkasov, said his client would accept the ruling because he had spent five months in detention. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s former subordinate, Vladimir Churov, was easily elected head of the Central Elections Commission on Tuesday, replacing long-serving chairman Alexander Veshnyakov. |
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Combined Reports MOSCOW — The U.S. State Department has expressed alarm over “Russian government heavy-handedness” against protesters who tried to hold an anti-Kremlin march in Nizhny Novgorod. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said Monday in Washington that authorities’ prevention of the march “raises serious concerns about Russians’ ability to exercise their rights to assembly, free speech and peaceful protest. |
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The Botkin Infectious Disease Hospital on Thursday opened a state-funded consultancy center for HIV-positive people and their relatives in an effort to overcome the social isolation associated with the disease and provide patients with timely and adequate treatment. |
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 Morgan Stanley Real Estate has acquired a 24.99 percent stake in RBI construction holding. By combining their resources the two companies hope to develop ambitiously large-scale regional projects, increasing the value of the holding several times over. |
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St. Petersburg-based IP and Internet provider Quantum Communications has announced it is to undergo a rebranding as part of a new strategy of aggressive regional expansion. |
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MOSCOW — A $16 million executive jet ordered by Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema Group was forced to land at Milwaukee’s Mitchell Airport by U.S. authorities last week after a dispute over its ownership, a company spokesperson confirmed Wednesday. U.S. |
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KIEV — A Russian businessman allied with Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was shot dead by a sniper as he was being escorted from a Kiev courthouse by police. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and Canada, the only net crude-oil exporters in the Group of Eight, will seek ways to promote joint energy projects that may lead to a global supply network, ministers from both countries said. Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev met with Canadian Trade Minister David Emerson in Ottawa on Tuesday to update foreign investment rules and technology standards that they say have hampered trade. |
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ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The European Union tiptoed into the race for Central Asia’s vast energy resources on Wednesday, but it faces tough competition in a region where both Moscow and Washington are already elbowing hard for control. |
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 “This is very easy to understand,” said President Vladimir Putin last year, explaining his idea of an energy policy. “Just think back to childhood when you go into the street with a candy in your hand and another kid says, ‘Give it to me.’ You clutch your little sweaty fist tight around it and answer, ‘What do I get in return?’” So why, when it comes to the Iranian nuclear file, has Putin finally opened his little sweaty fist, signing on — with no apparent compensation — to additional United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic while calling for a halt to Russia’s construction of the nuclear reactor at Bushehr? That’s the question to which nobody seems to have anything better than a partial answer. |
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On Sunday, the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council, including Russia, unanimously passed Resolution 1747, which provides for the imposition of sanctions against Iran in response to its nuclear development program. |
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 Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra, the skiffle/Weimar cabaret-influenced band from London which arrives in the city this week, sings tragic yet utterly danceable songs about lost love and heavy drinking somewhere in concrete slums — invoking poetry that the late U. |
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The Rolling Stones, which has cancelled a local concert last year, is now due to perform in St. Petersburg on July 28, the band said in a statement late last week. |
 Combined reports President Vladimir Putin threw a star-studded Kremlin reception on Tuesday evening to celebrate cellist Mstislav Rostropovich’s 80th birthday. Among the guests were Monaco’s Prince Albert II and princesses from Spain, Greece, Jordan and Denmark, Interfax reported. |
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An opera that blurs the borders between opera and drama, “Jenufa,” which brought international recognition to its creator, Czech composer Leos Janacek when it first played in Prague in 1916, is coming to St. |
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Rarely do those who merely view art have the chance to trace the deeper artistic processes of creation directly from an artist. But at the National Center of Photography, Deborah Turbeville, a renowned American fashion and art photographer, is currently unveiling the primary sources of her inspiration in a lecture series entitled Elements of Style. The lectures introduce her collective muses, an eclectic source of elements that influence and inspire her artistic and commercial projects. In the series, which runs until April 12, Turbeville outlines the repertoire of elements she uses in photography, illustrated with slides of her past projects. |
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 The program notes to the annual Vertical Theater Festival, which took place at the Music Hall last weekend, state that the festival producers tried to “gather into one all the bits of the world mosaic that is contemporary Butoh from Japan, Europe and Russia. |
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This month’s announcement that Roman Abramovich is getting divorced from his wife Irina had a strange deja-vu quality to it, since the British tabloid News of the World ran the same story last October, prompting a swift denial from the billionaire. As before, the parties directly concerned are staying tight-lipped, but at least there’s another chance to look at pictures of the “stunning” Darya Zhukova in her bikini. |
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Most Eiffel 6 Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya. Tel: 315 4035 Open from 12 p.m. until last customer leaves Menu in Russian, French and English Dinner for two without alcohol 3,900 rubles ($150) Perched on the bank of the Neva and with impressive views of the glittering St. |
 “300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid. Adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, it offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s. The basic story is a good deal older. |
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 LONDON — The dispute with Iran over Britain’s captured sailors and marines escalated sharply on Wednesday when Britain froze all “bilateral business” with Iran and the Iranians displayed some British prisoners on state television — an act condemned by the Foreign Office here as “completely unacceptable. |
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 LONDON — World Cup holders Italy and European champions Greece got back on track in Euro 2008 qualifying on Wednesday, but England labored to beat Andorra and Sweden suffered an upset in Northern Ireland. Striker Luca Toni headed a goal in each half as Italy beat Scotland 2-0 in Bari, sending a clear message to the rest of Group B and to the critics of under-fire coach Roberto Donadoni. The world champions looked sharp right from the start, despite not having played since a qualifying win over Georgia last November. |
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 MELBOURNE — Michael Phelps demolished his third world record in three days on Thursday to collect his fourth gold medal of the world championships and strengthen his claims to be the greatest swimmer of all time. |
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CSKA Advances ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — CSKA Moscow advanced to the Russian Hockey Leagues playoff semifinals after defeating Salavat Yulaev 3-1 in Ufa Monday night, winning the best of 5 series 3-2. The Moscow team, which finished the season in 6th place, was the only bottom seeded team to advance from the quarter finals. |
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MELBOURNE — A Ukrainian swimming coach filmed fighting with his daughter at the world championships in Melbourne told a magistrates court on Thursday that he would not repeat the behaviour. |
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Issues Archive