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MOSCOW — Securing gas supplies from Turkmenistan’s new leadership and the construction of a gas pipeline along the Caspian shore are set to dominate President Vladimir Putin’s weeklong trip to Central Asia that started Thursday. Putin is due to hold talks with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana on Thursday, before the two leaders travel to Turkmenistan for an informal summit with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov. Moscow faces steep competition from the United States, the European Union and China for Turkmenistan’s potentially huge gas reserves, which were mainly closed to foreign companies under the presidency of Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in December. Putin’s three-day visit to Turkmenistan will start Thursday in Ashgabat, the Kremlin press service said. Putin, Nazarbayev and Berdymukhammedov are then due to hold talks in the Caspian post of Turkmenbashi, a city known as Krasnovodsk in Soviet times. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Soldiers taking part in the Victory Parade on Palace Square on Wednesday. Four thousand servicemen, including over 1,000 officers took part in the celebrations marking the end of World War II. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin took a swipe at Estonia in an unusually politicized Victory Day speech Wednesday at the Red Square parade. Addressing around 7,000 troops and a few hundred guests on a cold, drizzly morning, Putin congratulated Russians on the 62nd anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany and called May 9 a holiday of “enormous moral significance and unifying force.
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All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Law enforcement officials found and defused a powerful car bomb in southwestern Moscow on Wednesday, preventing what could have been a deadly attack. The bomb, which contained 20 kilograms of plastic explosives and an unknown amount of ball bearings, was hidden inside a green Lada sedan parked on Ulitsa Profsoyuznaya, Interfax reported, citing a city law enforcement official. The explosives were hidden in the back seat, while the steel balls were packed inside the trunk, the source said. Ball bearings are used to drastically increase the deadly force of an explosion. Interfax said the bomb could have been activated in minutes. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The fountains at Peterhof, shortly after having been turned on for the first time this year on Tuesday. The ceremony and a concert were timed to coincide with the Victory Day celebrations. |
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PARIS — Russia cannot alter a U.S. plan to set up a missile defense system in nearby Poland, a senior U.S. official said in an interview published Wednesday. Washington has enraged Moscow with a plan to deploy 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic that it says would help shield Europe from a possible missile attack by nations such as Iran.
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Fellow conscripts on Thursday paid their last respects to Sergei Zavyalov, a 23-year-old recruit who died Saturday at the Military Medical Academy from severe head injuries sustained in a suspected hazing incident, at a ceremony held in his memory. Also on Thursday, the Sertolovo Military Garrison Prosecutor’s Office, which has been handling an investigation into the recruit’s death, charged a sergeant in the garrison with “deliberate infliction of grave physical injuries” on Zavyalov, said Colonel Yury Klyonov, aide to the chief military commander of the Leningrad Military District. |
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MOSCOW — Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov sharply criticized the EU Energy Charter and Estonia on Tuesday, in the latest sign that talks will be difficult at a Russia-EU summit next week. |
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MOSCOW — Human rights group Amnesty International accused Russia and China on Tuesday of breaching a UN arms embargo by letting weapons into Sudan, where it said they were used in “grave violations” of international law. Russia and China quickly rejected the report, and Sudan’s government said it was “not justified. |
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Russian Railways (RZD), citing economic factors, cancelled its St. Petersburg-Tallinn rail link just weeks after restarting the service. Coming on the eve of Victory Day celebrations, however, the move was seen as the latest twist in the dispute between Russia and Estonia over the relocation of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s giant state-controlled oil firm Rosneft won an auction for the Samara assets of bankrupt oil firm Yukos on Thursday with a winning bid of 165. |
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MOSCOW — The initial public offering book of Russia’s second-largest bank VTB has closed, with the global depositary receipts (GDR) issue 10 times oversubscribed, a source close to the offering told Reuters on Thursday. The source said there was still uncertainty over how many shares would be placed in Russia and how many abroad. |
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Kitted Out ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — CIT Finance investment bank increased assets by 17 percent in the first quarter of 2007, Interfax reported Tuesday. |
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ANKARA, Turkey — Gazprom is in negotiations to supply natural gas to a pipeline originally intended to reduce Europe’s heavy energy reliance on Moscow, people involved with the proposed link said. A senior Turkish Energy Ministry official said Gazprom had been in talks in the past few weeks with the Nabucco project’s Austria-led consortium. |
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MOSCOW — Golden Telecom said first-quarter net profit dropped by one-third because of the costs of a management incentive scheme. Management said Tuesday that it was taking steps to eliminate the earnings volatility caused by its so-called stock appreciation rights scheme, known as SAR. |
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 After setting up and manning a kind of blockade around the Estonian Embassy for about a week, pro-Kremlin youth organizations simply packed up and left Thursday without having accomplished anything. To save a little face, they cited the fact that the Estonian ambassador had left the embassy — the official explanation was she had gone on vacation — as a sign of victory, but it was hard to see just what the young activists expected to accomplish by surrounding the building in the first place. |
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8 p.m. was obviously far too late to leave home for tour of St. Petersburg’s sites. Everything closes early and we still needed to get across the city. |
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 This is the first article in a two-part series dedicated to the life and work of the only two Finnish architects who owned studios in St. Petersburg before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and designed buildings that can still be seen in the city today. Published for the first time, the article is by Finnish art historian Timo KeinEnen, head of the Archives of the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, who has just completed research in a number of the city’s libraries and archives. |
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It has been announced that Elton John will perform on Palace Square on July 6. The concert is promoted by PMI, the company behind the Rolling Stones’ local concert, scheduled to be held at the same location on July 28. |
 NORILSK, Russia — Mukum Sidikov’s grandfather left Norilsk after surviving the labor camps of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Sidikov, caretaker of the world’s most northerly mosque, retraced his grandfather’s footsteps in search of well-paid work in the Russian Arctic. Now he estimates the city is home to about 50,000 Muslims — just under one-quarter of the region’s population of about 210,000. Most are from Azerbaijan and the Russian republic of Dagestan and work as traders or construction workers. |
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 Jonathan Kent’s bold rendition of Richard Strauss’ expressionist opera “Elektra,” which premiered on Sunday at the Mariinsky Theater, fearlessly delves into the subconscious minds of a troubled family engulfed by angst, fear, rage and obsession. |
 Anyone who has ever seen the curiously addictive television series “Twin Peaks” or the accomplished and disturbing “Mulholland Drive” knows that David Lynch is to mainstream cinema what punk-rock is to classical opera. He divides opinion as a matter of course and the ongoing debate between those who think he is a certifiable genius and those who find his work an unapproachable enigma doesn’t seem likely to end soon. |
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It’s fair to say that Edith Piaf would not recognize the type of music called Russian shanson. Hefty men decked in gold chains sing mournful songs about hard fate, loving mothers and fickle lovers, all apparently set to the same demo track on an electronic keyboard from the 1980s. |
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Mozzarella Bar // 153 Moskovsky Prospekt. Tel: 388 1482 // Open daily from noon to 11 p.m. // Major credit cards accepted // Menu in English and Russian // Dinner for two with a glass of wine 2,085 rubles ($81) The recent arrival of Mozzarella Bar, a new Italian trattoria located on Moskovsky Prospekt in the south of St. Petersburg marks what is hoped will become a long-awaited expansion of good eateries from the historic city center into more recently built districts. The owners of city restaurants are yet to venture far beyond the limits of downtown, with the exception of glam suburban venues of the caliber of Chaliapin in Repino and Podvorye in Pavlovsk. |
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 If ever a movie had a case of the blues and the blahs, it’s “Spider-Man 3,” the third and what feels like the end of Sam Raimi’s big-screen comic-book adaptations. |
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 Tony Blair said on Thursday he would step down as prime minister on June 27, more than 10 years after winning power in what was hailed as a new dawn for Britain that has since been darkened by the Iraq war. “I tell you one thing: hand on heart, I did what I thought was right,” Blair told Labour Party members on Thursday. |
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SYDNEY — Australian officials say they are obliged to go ahead with their scheduled tour of Zimbabwe despite calls from the government to boycott the trip. Australia’s foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer wants the tour cancelled in protest at Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Downer was due to meet with Cricket Australia (CA) officials and the Australian Cricketers Association but CA spokesman Peter Young told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio the tour would only be cancelled if the safety of the players was at risk. “The ICC policy is that it’s obligatory for all ICC nations to visit each other regularly unless it’s not safe or unless it is impossible for some reason beyond the control of the visiting nation,” Young said. |
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/ Reuters
Maria Sharapova speaks to promote Russia’s bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, in Beverly Hills, California on Wednesday. |
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LONDON — Chelsea and Manchester United, league champions old and new, produced a strictly mid-table performance on Wednesday in a goalless showdown that came a month too late. The game, which should have been one of the highlights of the season, was downgraded to dead rubber status when United secured the title on Sunday by virtue of Chelsea only drawing 1-1 at Arsenal.
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LONDON — Arguably the most important game of the Premier League season takes place at Bramall Lane on Sunday when Sheffield United faces Wigan Athletic with each side aware that victory will keep them up for at least another year. With relegation estimated to cost anything between $60 million and $100 million, staying in the top flight means everything. |
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JACKSONVILLE, United States — Tiger Woods will look for just his fourth title of season and a reversal of recent history at the PGA Players Championship which started Thursday at TPC Sawgrass. |
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SYDNEY — Australian punters have all but given up hope of Lleyton Hewitt winning this month’s French Open, with bookmakers offering the extraordinary odds of 200-1 about the former world number one. When Hewitt was at the peak of his powers, Australians bet millions of dollars on him winning events but no longer. |
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You’ve paid? Then don’t worry! MegaFon North-West has introduced a new service, “SMS-Check,” which allows information to be received quickly in the form of SMS messages regarding payments into personal accounts. As subscribers receive their wage payments, they will receive notification in the form of a text message, telling him or her of the date and amount of the payment and the total amount in the account. The SMS-Check service is provided without a monthly subscription charge. You can turn on the service independently with the command *105#21#, sending a “21” text message to the number 000105, by phoning 01055 or by contacting the subscriber service center. |
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 Judging by the pace of the development of the corporate market for mobile communications, an office mobile phone will soon be as commonplace among employees as computers or stationary. |
 The Second Mini-Football Championship for teams from children’s homes and hostels in the North-West of Russia for the “The Future Depends on You” Cup has been completed. Forward, Russia! I don’t understand anything about football. I’ve never understood what all the fuss around this game is about. Or why millions of adult, intelligent and entirely rational people allow their mood to be dependant on the efforts of a bunch of strangers in T-shirts and shorts. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive