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MOSCOW — Authorities opened a murder investigation Friday into the death of a senior executive at state-run bank VTB, who was found dead with his legs bound, in a swimming pool at his luxury dacha outside Moscow. The body of Oleg Zhukovsky, a VTB managing director who handled accounts in the notoriously murky timber industry, was discovered Thursday in the pool at his dacha in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region, Oleg Krasnoshchyokov, a duty officer with the Odintsovo police department, said Friday. |
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Moving the Russian Navy Headquarters from Moscow to St. Petersburg will cost more than a billion dollars, Russian navy experts said. The navy experts said this would be the minimum cost for the move, while independent experts said the figure would be twice as high, without even including the construction of secure headquarters to be used in the event of an attack, Interfax said on Monday. |
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A “political purge” is the main reason behind the outcome of the Dec.2 parliamentary elections in Russia that resulted in the pro-Kremlin United Russia party winning 64.7 percent of seats in the State Duma, according to Grigory Golosov, a political sciences doctor at St. Petersburg’s European University. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The European Court of Human Rights has ordered Russia to pay 15,000 euros ($22,000) to an activist with the banned National Bolshevik Party who was convicted of seizing a presidential administration reception office, the activist’s lawyer said. |
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Members of the St Petersburg Organization for Deaf and Mute Children (ARDIS) have voiced concerns over the infringement of their rights, challenging City Hall and the Legislative Assembly to adhere to a set of proposals they authored last month. |
 MOSCOW — Despite having difficulties with holding a congress the night before, the Russian People’s Democratic Union managed to select its leader, Mikhail Kasyanov, as its candidate in the March presidential election. Kasyanov, a former prime minister, was approved unanimously Saturday by an initiative group of 692 members at the Moscow Palace of Youth. |
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German Visa Fraud BERLIN (AP) — An employee at the German Embassy in Moscow has been fired after authorities discovered that hundreds of visas were issued to people based on forged documents, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday. |
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MOSCOW — Americans who love celebrities follow the escapades of Lindsay Lohan. The British consume themselves with the romantic lives of their royals. But in Moscow, where raw political power and big money hold sway, it is the children and grandchildren of politicians and oligarchs whose love lives, fashion tastes and socializing are widely chronicled and followed. |
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 MOSCOW — Shooting Siberian rapids and whipping up the Altai on horseback: Neil McGowan sounds like a National Geographic adventurer, but he has made a successful career in Russia organizing these trips for others and sometimes doing them himself — with a little opera on the side. McGowan, 47, is a cheery Londoner and the managing director of The Russia Experience, a tour operator that owns the Trans-Siberian and The Beetroot Backpackers brands. |
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MOSCOW — Renault has emerged the winner to buy a 25 percent stake in AvtoVAZ as the French carmaker looks to reinforce its position in what will soon become Europe’s largest car market and help the Russian giant resuscitate its troubled Lada brand. On Saturday, Renault president and CEO Carlos Ghosn and Sergei Chemezov, head of new state holding Russian Technologies, which includes AvtoVAZ, signed a memorandum of understanding in Tolyatti, agreeing to help revive the Lada brand and share technological expertise. |
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REMAR Group and MGA Ad Group have presented a new high-tech advertisement technology known as Interactive Projection Systems, which was installed last month in several shopping centers in St. |
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Real Estate Investment ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — TriGranit, a Hungarian developer, will invest about 20 billion rubles ($817 million) into real estate projects in St. Petersburg, City Hall said Friday in a statement. According to the agreement signed between St. |
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MOSCOW — After the virtual nonevent of the State Duma elections, it was back to business last week as Russian markets ticked up on the back of a flurry of deals and relief over gas price reform. |
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BRUSSELS — Poland and Russia expressed hope Friday that a long-running dispute over Moscow’s ban on Polish meat imports could be resolved in the course of a series of high-level diplomatic contacts mapped out amid warming ties. “I think we’re on the right track,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a Brussels news briefing before a meeting with Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski aimed at normalizing ties that deteriorated under Poland’s previous government. |
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Rosneft, Finnish utility Fortum and Gas de France are considering bidding for control of TGK-10, a source close to the deal said. The three energy giants have signed confidentiality agreements allowing them to enter the company’s data room, which lays out information to potential investors, the source said Thursday. |
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TBILISI, Georgia — Georgian police smashed monitors and pulled out wires in a deliberate act of sabotage when they raided an opposition television station last month, managers said Friday after they were let back in for the first time. The Imedi station is operated by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and was at the center of a crackdown on the opposition that hurt President Mikheil Saakashvili’s democratic credentials and dismayed his Western allies. After pressure from Western governments, a Georgian court lifted an injunction that had barred Imedi from broadcasting. Police unlocked the gates at midnight Thursday, allowing staff into the three-story building. |
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 MOSCOW — Michael Harms, the head of the German business delegation in Russia, is putting much trust in Russia’s economic future. “The mood is very, very good,” he said in a recent interview in his office in Moscow. |
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KIEV — A blast damaged a major gas pipeline running through Ukraine, the second such explosion this year, but supplies to Europe continue to run smoothly, the pipeline’s operator said Friday. The pipeline takes Gazprom gas from the Arctic Urengoi gas field, through the Urals and to Ukraine’s border with Slovakia. |
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 MOSCOW — International hotel chains are increasingly beating a path to far-flung cities around the country in a bid to meet increasing demand for rooms outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. From Kaliningrad to Irkutsk, world famous brands, such as Radisson SAS, Holiday Inn, Hilton and Park Inn, are set to launch in these previously untapped markets, as they try to make business and leisure travel inside the country more convenient. |
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TURKMENBASHI, Turkmenistan — Locked away during Soviet times and later under the 21-year rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan has been slowly opening its doors since Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov came to power a year ago. |
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MOSCOW — There is a massive housing shortage in the northern capital that will not be satisfied in the near future. In the first quarter of 2007 housing for sale on the St. Petersburg market totaled 4.77 million square meters, according to the 2007 Real Estate Overview of St. Petersburg by Peterburgskaya Nedvizhimost. |
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 With the dust settling from the State Duma elections, all eyes have turned to the presidential election in March. But some in the Kremlin might be turning their thoughts to the presidential election in general — as in getting rid of it altogether. One thing seems clear when one looks back at the presidency of Vladimir Putin from the early assaults on independent media, the Yeltsin-era oligarchs and the recent Duma elections: It demonstrates a clear, almost step-by-step progression toward a closed, unaccountable and authoritarian political system. |
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Sixteen years ago Saturday, the leaders of the three Slavic republics of the Soviet Union gathered at a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha nature reserve near Minsk and signed an agreement that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. |
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The Hotel Charm isn’t really a hotel any more, and it’s definitely not charming. The hallways are scruffy, the stairwells are filthy, broken light fittings cast a pall of gloom across the corridors, and in winter it’s cold and damp. But for more than a decade, this dingy concrete block in Tbilisi has been home to around 25 families. |
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Now that the pretend results from the pretend elections to the nation’s pretend parliament have been certified, the next order of political business will be the pretend presidential election in March. |
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 TAEAN, South Korea — South Korea’s worst ever oil spill spread along a pristine coastal region Monday as the government came under fire amid charges it acted too slowly to limit the disaster. Almost 9,000 troops, police and volunteers armed with shovels and buckets struggled to clean up the huge slick. |
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BRUSSELS — Kosovo Albanian leaders said on Monday they will start immediate talks with Western backers towards an independence declaration as the EU came close to unity in support of the province’s drive to secede from Serbia. |
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NUSA DUA, Indonesia — Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at UN talks in Bali on Monday as part of a “roadmap” to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009. “It’s prejudging what the outcome should be,” chief negotiator Harlan Watson said of a draft suggesting that rich nations should aim to axe emissions of heat-trapping gases by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. |
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PORTLAND, Oregon — The United States have reasserted their Davis Cup dominance, earning their 32nd title with a 4-1 triumph over Russia in the 2007 World Group final. But captain Patrick McEnroe’s close-knit squad of Andy Roddick, James Blake and Bob and Mike Bryan, who claimed America’s first Davis Cup crown in 12 years, were barely done celebrating when they began looking ahead to the difficult task of retaining the title in 2008. |
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Issues Archive