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 President Vladimir Putin accused Washington on Monday of plotting to undermine December parliamentary elections seen widely as a demonstration of his enduring power in Russia. Putin, drawing on resurgent nationalist sentiment ahead of Sunday’s poll, also said Russia must maintain its defenses to discourage others from “poking their snotty noses” in its affairs. Europe, however, joined the United States in voicing concern over a weekend police crackdown on protests by an opposition that says it has been banished from the airwaves and from the streets by an overbearing Kremlin. |
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 European politicians have criticized the actions taken by Russian police in response to last weekend’s Dissenters’ Marches in Moscow and St. Petersburg. |
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Negotiations between Ford and striking workers at the company’s plant in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad Oblast, failed on Monday. “We haven’t agreed on anything,” Alexei Etmanov, head of the plant’s trade union, said. “The administration said they were ready to talk about a pay rise but refused to give any figures before the strike is over. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Once a lively venue for arguments, fistfights and hurled objects, the State Duma — a place Duma Speaker and United Russia head Boris Gryzlov once fittingly described as “not a place for discussion” — has become increasingly sedate over the past four years. |
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LONDON — Alexander Litvinenko’s widow is seeking a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that Russia was complicit in poisoning the former Federal Security Service officer with radioactive polonium, her lawyer said Friday. |
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The British foreign ministry updated its travel advice for British visitors to Russia on Monday noting that “demonstrations... have occasionally turned violent.” However its general level of risk of dangers in Russia — most concerned with travel to war-torn Southern Republics, terrorism, street crime and infrastructure safety — remained unchanged. The new advice was offered a day after riot police violently broke up a demonstration in St. Petersburg. Hundreds of people were detained. The full advice, posted at www.fco.gov.uk, reads: “General elections for the Russian State Duma will take place on 2 December 2007. Political tensions can be expected to be heightened in the period surrounding the elections. |
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 KRASNOGORSK, Moscow Region — Toward the back of the cavernous exhibition hall, Alexander Svalov leaned nonchalantly against the body of the 2-meter-long saber-toothed tiger and smiled. |
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MOSCOW — A suicide bomber could have been responsible for a blast Thursday that tore through a commuter bus in North Ossetia and killed six people, a law enforcement source said Friday. A homemade bomb containing around 300 grams of TNT and stuffed with ball bearings detonated inside the bus as it approached a police checkpoint between North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria, authorities said. |
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 MOSCOW — Mikhail Kasyanov says he is the target of a vast, pro-Kremlin conspiracy to undermine his goal of shaking up an authoritarian political system. Alternatively, the former prime minister might just be the unluckiest presidential candidate on Earth. The last meeting of Kasyanov’s political movement, the Russian People’s Democratic Union, was disrupted earlier this month when delegates were told that the venue, a trade-union hall in Tver, had been shut down for fire-safety reasons. |
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MOSCOW — Prosecutors charged Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak on Friday with attempting to embezzle $43 million, in a case that may damage his boss, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. Storchak is the country’s foreign debt negotiator and oversees a $148 billion budget Stabilization Fund, making him a key player in managing the windfall reaped from the global boom in oil and commodities prices. “Storchak was questioned for over four hours. He gave testimony but did not admit any guilt,” defense lawyer Alexander Petrov said after a hearing at Moscow’s Lefortovo jail. Petrov said he would probably appeal the charges. Kudrin leapt to the defense of Storchak, 53, a trusted aide who was also charged with forming an “organized group” with two businessmen in a bid to embezzle budget funds after failing to collect a debt owed by Algeria. |
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 Accor, the European leader in hospitality and tourism, opened its first Russian Ibis hotel Friday. The newly built nine-floor Ibis Hotel offers 221 rooms, five meeting rooms, a restaurant and bar. |
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Net profit of X5 Retail Group, a company that operates the Pyatyorochka and Perekrestok supermarkets, increased by 50 percent during January-September 2007 compared to the same period last year — up to $54 million, Interfax reported Monday. Sales increased by 50 percent up to $3. |
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4 Stores for Konsul ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Konsul, one of the largest retailers of Swiss watches in Russia, will open four new stores by the end of 2007, the company said last week in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — Russian stocks suffered a battering across the board last week, challenging the perception that the country is a safe haven from the storm in the United States. “Many commentators and market participants thought the crisis would not have an impact in Russia at all,” Eugene Belin, head of fixed income, currencies and commodities at Citibank Russia, said last week. |
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YEKATERINBURG — Steelmaker Maxi Group said Friday that it would sell a 51 percent stake to Novolipetsk Steel by the end of the year after a deal to sell to billionaire Alisher Usmanov fell through. |
 MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov agreed Friday to sell a strategic stake in Norilsk Nickel to Oleg Deripaska’s United Company RusAl, pressuring his erstwhile partner to close a deal first. But the transaction could only happen if Vladimir Potanin, co-owner of Norilsk, failed to take up an earlier offer to buy a one-quarter stake in Norilsk from Prokhorov’s Onexim Group for $15. |
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VIENNA — Austrian builder Strabag, whose IPO last month relied on investors’ hopes for growth in Russia, has signed two steelwork deals worth a combined 484 million euros ($722 million) in Russia, it said Friday. |
 Baker & McKenzie is one of the few international law firms to operate two offices in Russia, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Maxim Kalinin, a partner at Baker & McKenzie who manages the staff of 30 at the St. Petersburg office, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, speaks about legal consulting in Russia and the company’s prospects in St. Petersburg. I came to Baker & McKenzie in 1994. At that time the St. |
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 Two significant European Community-backed information and communications technology (ICT) projects for northwest Russia took place in St. Petersburg within the last month, with the final conferences of the EU-sponsored “Development of Interactive Services of Internet-based Government to Business in Northwest Russia (G2B-NWR)” project, led by Steinbeis GmbH&Co. |
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MOSCOW — The country’s second-biggest insurer, Ingosstrakh, will soon acquire three leading firms in the former Soviet Union, but its growth is being hampered by a shareholder dispute, its controlling shareholder, Basic Element, said. The acquisitions in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan will either be the largest or in the top five in their markets, said Olga Zinovieva, head of financial services at Basic Element, a conglomerate owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska. |
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 There is a discernible pattern to President Vladimir Putin’s calculated confrontations with the West. It is described by three concentric circles radiating outward from Moscow. The first of these rings delineates a domestic arena from which the United States and Europe have been locked out. |
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I was a bit shocked by the photograph of President Vladimir Putin that the Financial Times ran on the front page of its Oct. 21 edition. The photograph showed Putin with a contemptuous sneer on his face. |
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White smoke drifted low across Rustaveli Avenue for the second time in a month. But this time it was not the tear gas fired by riot police as they broke up anti-government protests. These were clouds of dry ice, pumped out from smoke machines on a stage outside the Georgian parliament, as a band of aging, frizzy-haired British rockers called Smokie chugged through their back catalogue of 1970s hits. |
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Only one book published in Moscow in the spring of 1937 resounded with a good humor and joie de vivre utterly alien to the Great Terror then gaining momentum: “One-Storied America,” a travelogue by the two hallmark Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. |
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SUSONO, Japan — Toyota Motor Corp unveiled on Monday what it called the world’s most true-to-life driving simulator to help it develop new safety features and reach its ultimate goal of eliminating all traffic deaths. In a demonstration of its latest safety technologies at its Higashifuji Technical Center near Mt. |
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 MOMBASA, Kenya — Bethan, 56, lives in southern England on the same street as best friend Allie, 64. They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls.” Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex. |
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 DURBAN — Africa passed the first big test of its ability to stage the continent’s first World Cup finals with a successful preliminary draw that gets the campaign to reach the 2010 finals off in earnest. Host South Africa put on a slick show, with just one little glitch in Sunday’s draw, sending visiting delegations from more than 150 nations away on Monday in various degrees of hope, expectation and, in a few cases, dismay. |
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MOSCOW — When a national football team qualifies for a major tournament, they are typically greeted as heroes back home. But when Russia last week qualified for the European Championships, it was Moscow’s small Croatian community — not Russian footballers — who were overwhelmed by gratitude from relieved fans. |
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