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Over the next 12 years more than 80 kilometers of track and over 40 new stations will be added to St. Petersburg’s metro. Such are the optimistic plans proposed by the St. Petersburg Metropolitan program that is to be confirmed by the city government next week, according to Fontanka.ru. To fulfill the project the city will need about 400 billion rubles. Currently St. Petersburg has an acute lack of essential metro stations, and 80 percent of city residents have to get to the metro by over-ground public transport. The new stations are to be constructed on Vasilievsky Island and in the Frunzensky, Krasnoselsky and Krasnogvardeisky districts, as well as in some other districts of the city. Currently the most overburdened stations in St. Petersburg are ‘Kupchino’ and ‘Prospekt Veteranov’. |
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ICE ESCAPADES
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Sasha Cohen performing a routine in the Two Capitals Ice Show, which took place simultaneously on Palace Square and Moscow’s Red Square on Wednesday evening. |
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MOSCOW — Dmitry Medvedev, almost certain to become the next president of Russia, on Thursday formally made his application to run in the March 2 election, but admitted he was nervous at “a tough job” ahead in the Kremlin. The popularity ratings of Medvedev, first deputy prime minister, have risen sharply after President Vladimir Putin said last week he wanted his close friend and ally to succeed him.
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 Lack of transparency within Russian prisons and the penal system in general were the main reasons behind a series of violent riots that stormed through several jails in the country over the past year, according to analysts. Boris Panteleyev, a human rights advocate with the non-governmental Committee For Civil Rights, said several prisoners and their relatives had alerted them of a critical, highly explosive situation at a colony in the settlement of Metallostroi, in the outskirts of St. |
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 KIEV — Ukraine’s parliament on Tuesday restored Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, sealing a political comeback for a leading figure from the Orange Revolution three years ago. |
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MOSCOW — Ilya Yashin, the 24-year-old leader of Yabloko’s youth group, announced Wednesday that he would seek to unseat Grigory Yavlinsky as the party’s leader and unite liberal politicians in a new political movement. “People are not able to choose between good democrats and bad democrats,” Yashin said at a news conference. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Nine independent candidates, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, have been registered as potential contestants in the March 2 presidential election, the Central Elections Commission said Wednesday. Independent candidates had until midnight Tuesday to submit documents confirming that they had at least 500 voters backing their bid to enter the race, in which First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is the likely front-runner after receiving the support of President Vladimir Putin. The Central Elections Commission received documents from 26 candidates claiming 500 supporters but approved only nine of those candidates, commission members said Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin was named Time magazine’s person of the year on Wednesday, becoming the first Russian to win the title since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did it twice in the late 1980s. |
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MOSCOW — Six of the 32 committee chairmanships in the newly elected State Duma will go to parties other than United Russia, which chaired every single committee in the previous Duma, a senior United Russia official said Wednesday. Three new committees — on youth affairs, high-tech and transportation — have been added to the Duma as part of a restructuring process aimed at accomplishing “the daunting tasks that United Russia has set for itself for the next four years,” said Andrei Vorobyov, the head of United Russia’s executive committee. |
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MOSCOW — A group of Russian Orthodox believers have accused Coca-Cola of blasphemy over a marketing campaign showing the cross and onion-shaped church domes on outdoor refrigerators, Nizhny Novgorod prosecutors said Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW — Gazprom and its German partner BASF opened a field in Tomsk, western Siberia to fill a new export pipeline as output at older Russian projects declines. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Gazprom chairman Dmitry Medvedev officially started commercial production of the Yuzhno-Russkoye field at a televised ceremony in Moscow on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — The world’s top magazine papermaker, UPM-Kymmene, agreed Wednesday to form a 50-50 joint venture with Sveza to invest more than 1 billion euros ($1. |
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Okhta Center Plugged ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of natural gas producer Gazprom, began television advertisements in St. Petersburg to gain support for a skyscraper it plans to build in the city center, Vedomosti reported. The campaign will try to counter opposition from local politicians and UNESCO to the 67-floor skyscraper by featuring “prominent” city residents in the ads, Vedomosti said, citing Alexander Dybal, a Gazprom Neft vice president. The company plans to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bolster support for the high-rise, which will house Gazprom Neft’s new headquarters, the newspaper said. |
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 MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Greece wanted to double imports of Russian gas, and he praised progress in a project to send Russian oil from Bulgaria to Greece. |
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MOSCOW — “Irrational” domestic spending from the $150 billion stabilization fund could fuel further inflation and make the economy once more dependent on the whims of global oil markets, Pyotr Kazakevich, the official in charge of the fund, warned on Tuesday. Few could have foreseen that the stabilization fund — first proposed by President Vladimir Putin’s maverick economic adviser Andrei Illarionov — would accumulate so much in the four years since its creation. |
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 As the 200th anniversary year of formal diplomatic ties between Russia and the United States comes to a close, it is a natural moment to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. That is not exactly an easy thing to do these days. In our broader relationship, mutual frustration often obscures mutual interest. |
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President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Belarus was rather strange. First, Putin arrived with a huge retinue that included Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov and Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov. |
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 Mikhail Borzykin is angry again. The Kremlin’s clampdown on the press and democracy has driven the frontman of Televizor, one of the bands that helped to put an end to Soviet rule in the 1980s, to take part in street protests — and write songs such as “Stay Home” urging people to get out and protest. |
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“Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary,” a book by musician Lydia Lunch, was one of the grounds on which Boris Kupriyanov, head of Moscow’s leading indie bookstore Falanster, has been threatened with prosecution for “spreading pornography,” a crime that could lead to two years in prison. |
 The Famous Alumnae of the St. Petersburg University cultural fund presented the second volume of its book, “Influential University Students. Alumnae of the Leningrad-Petersburg University. Who’s Who” on Wednesday. The ceremony was attended by the rector of St. Petersburg University, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the leader of the Patriots of Russia political party, Gennady Seleznyov and the chairman of the city’s committee for foreign affairs, Alexander Prokhorenko. |
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 This year, journalist David E. Hoffman published a book called “The Oligarchs,” a historical account of the way Yury Luzhkov, Boris Berezovsky and others acquired large sums of money and power. |
 Olympic champion ice dancer Roman Kostomarov sat at the wheel of a jeep, his head bowed over the wheel. His ex-girlfriend slammed the door and walked away, angry that he refused her invitation to come up for a cup of coffee. “Cut!” the director said, reminding Kostomarov to look at his former “sweetheart” as she turned her back. |
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Commentators often proclaim that the Russian language is in a sorry state and launch various campaigns and initiatives intended to slow down its demise. |
 In 1887, in her early 40s, Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, took up the relatively new art form of photography. She adopted the hobby with relish and was often seen rushing about the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana in an apron, her fingernails blackened by developing chemicals. Her husband hated to be photographed. Yet every year on their wedding anniversary, Sophia put on her finest clothes and lured the famous writer into the frame for a commemorative photograph. |
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 Leo Tolstoy’s comment that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” struck a best-selling chord with talk-show audiences across America when Oprah Winfrey assigned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of “Anna Karenina” to her book club in 2004. |
 Every year, hungover Russians crawl out of bed on New Year’s Day to watch “Song of the Year,” a seemingly never-ending pop marathon, in which top stars sing their biggest hits of the year. This January, the show lasted more than four hours, although to be fair it was broadcast over two days to avoid sequin overload. |
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Staraya Tamozhnya // Tamozhennyi pereulok, 1 // 327-8980 // Open 1 p.m. through 1a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Lunch for two: 3,600 rubles ($150) The Staraya Tamozhnya restaurant has been long known for excellent French and European cuisine, elegant style and high prices. |
 In the latest from the 83-year-old director, things go horribly wrong, exactly as planned. Few contemporary American directors have plumbed the problem of morality quite like Sidney Lumet. Then again, few American directors have been contemporary for as long as he has. Lumet is 83, and his career has spanned half a century and more than 40 movies — not all of them good, obviously. |
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GALLE, Sri Lanka — Chaminda Vaas claimed four for 24 to leave England in disarray on 61 for six when rain stopped play in the third and final test against England on Thursday. Sri Lanka had earlier piled up 499 for eight declared with Mahela Jayawardene extending his overnight score to 213 not out. |
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BEIJING — Visitors to China will no longer have to fill in health declaration forms from next month as a way of simplifying entry procedures ahead of next year’s Beijing Olympics, state media said on Thursday. |
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