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 Eighty Russian sportsmen, actors and other prominent people carried the Olympic torch through St. Petersburg on Saturday before the relay moved on to protest-hit events in London and Paris on Sunday and Monday. Fyodor Yemelyanenko, four times mixed martial arts world champion, said he was “moved” to carry the torch. “I was very happy to touch history in this way,” Yemelyanenko said. Nikolai Drozdov, 70, a TV presenter, said he was overwhelmed to carry the torch. |
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 As the Bejing Olympic flame passed with pomp through St. Petersburg on Saturday, small protests against human rights abuses in China were curbed by the authorities despite having either been previously agreed with the administration or not requiring such agreement under Russian law. |
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SOCHI, Krasnodar Region — Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush didn’t resolve their differences on missile defense but agreed to deepen cooperation, speaking warmly, almost nostalgically of each other during their farewell meeting on Sunday. The U.S. president also met with Putin’s handpicked successor, whom he called “a smart fellow,” saying he liked that Dmitry Medvedev wasn’t rushing to assert himself as Russia’s new president. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Russia’s largest operator of bus tours to Europe has canceled all its tours to Britain after 21 out of 39 people on a tour had their visa applications refused in Moscow, the Russian Tour Industry Union said Friday. Turtrans-Voyazh canceled a tour that was due to leave April 27 after more than half the group was refused visas, said Irina Tyurina, a spokeswoman for the tour industry union. One person had traveled from Novosibirsk to give fingerprints as part of the application procedure. Turtrans-Voyazh is the largest bus tour operator in Russia, carrying out around 40 percent of such tours, Tyurina said. She put the visa problems down to discrimination against bus tours, which are seen as more likely to attract illegal immigrants. “There exists a stereotype on the Russian market that they are cheaper,” she said. |
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ON GUARD!
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Fencers demonstrating their skills and giving a master class as part of the run-up to City Fencers’ Day to be held on May 18 at the Peter and Paul Fortress. |
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Members of the liberal opposition have decided to join forces and form a broad nationwide democratic movement that is expected to hold its founding congress in November 2008. At a groundbreaking conference titled “The New Agenda for Democratic Movement” in St. Petersburg on Saturday, more than 200 delegates from more than 30 regions in Russia voted to create a movement and passed a resolution to be distributed in the provinces.
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SOCHI, Krasnodar Region — President George W. Bush and his host, President Vladimir Putin, didn’t allow what have been strained relations and a host of unresolved issues between their countries to put a damper on their last dinner together. Instead, they danced. |
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St. Petersburg’s Vasileostrovsky district court closed the city’s Waterville aqua park on Friday after a number of swimmers received medical attention last month when water in the pool was contaminated. |
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A jury at the St. Petersburg city court on Monday acquitted three men accused of planning to assassinate Governor Valentina Matviyenko, the court said. The three men — engineer Timur Saidgareyev, 29, computer specialist Ravil Muratov, 20, and college student Vladislav Baranov, 17 — were charged with the plot in May last year. |
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 Next year Finnair will start operating four daily flights between St. Petersburg and Helsinki, a total of eight flights per week more than it currently operates, the company announced last week at a press conference. Russian passengers can already fly to over 40 destinations across Europe and Asia by using Helsinki’s Vantaa airport as a transfer hub. |
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MOSCOW — Political paralysis as ministers wait for their new president to take over has dashed hopes of a quick deal with the European Union on Russian entry to the World Trade Organization, a senior Western diplomat said. |
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MOSCOW — It was a strangely personal moment. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin took time out at a conference on globalization last week to answer some handwritten questions. The most impassioned of these came from a group of minority shareholders in VTB, one of the country’s worst-performing stocks since the bank’s “people’s IPO” last May, on why the stock was in freefall. Leaning toward the audience, Kudrin first noted that the investors, many of whom had counted on the government’s pledge to support the stock, should be aware that stocks go down as well as up. Then, in what analysts suggested was talking up his own company, Kudrin, the chairman of VTB’s supervisory board, urged investors to “hang on. |
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 LUKoil, the country’s second-biggest oil firm, has more than halved its oil output growth forecast for 2008, its chief executive said Friday, confirming analysts’ views that the country’s oil production is slowing. |
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MOSCOW — Miners at RusAl’s Little Red Riding Hood mine in the Sverdlovsk region on Friday ended their 10-day occupation after senior company executives spent a night negotiating with local trade union leaders. RusAl vice president Alexander Livshits and Anatoly Reshetnikov, a government-relations official for the company, guaranteed that the miners would not be fined or dismissed for taking part in the strike. |
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AMSTERDAM — Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell sees increasing opportunities in Russia despite growing state control of the energy sector, a Dutch paper quoted Shell’s head in Russia as saying on Monday. |
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LSR Begins Building ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — LSR Group, a Russian property developer and maker of building materials, has begun construction of a $12 million crushed granite plant near St. Petersburg to take advantage of “growing demand” for the material. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s former electricity monopoly UES said on Monday it will be accepting bids for the government’s 32 percent stake in regional power producer TGK-7 until April 21. |
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MTS (Mobile TeleSystems), one of the largest cellular operators in Russia, will invest $100 million into the development of its 3G (Third Generation Technology) network in St. Petersburg this year, the company’s top managers said Saturday at a press conference. |
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MOSCOW — Microsoft has announced that it will sell its software to less wealthy media outlets at discount prices in an effort to help them avoid pressure from the authorities based on the possession and use of pirated programs. |
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MOSCOW — VimpelCom became the first operator to introduce the BlackBerry service to the country, selling a contract to the Russian unit of the world’s second-largest cigarette maker, British American Tobacco. VimpelCom said Friday that its customers would use the 8700g model, a wireless handheld device produced and sold worldwide by Canada’s Research In Motion. |
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 President George W. Bush did not get everything he wanted from NATO’s summit that ended Friday in Bucharest, but he got quite a bit. Washington secured alliance support for U.S. missile-defense plans in Europe — implying agreement that there is a threat from Iran that warrants the scheme. |
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War, runs a Russian joke, is a means by which Americans learn geography. Funny — but also very much on target. Having discovered the location of Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. |
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Many in the West believe that Vladimir Putin has become a dictator and has found in Dmitry Medvedev a convenient seat holder while he himself will rule as prime minister once he steps down. I do not think this is Putin’s intention. But appearances matter, and they might be misleading. |
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These are the best of times; these are the worst of times. Charles Dickens’ famous words describe the present state of European Union-Russia relations perfectly. |
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 The snowcapped mountains of the Caucasus, which stretch for more than 1,000 kilometers between the Caspian and the Black Sea, owe their existence to a geological collision. Twenty-five million years ago, the landmasses of Europe and Asia crashed into each other, pushing the edges skyward. In “The Ghost of Freedom,” a new history of the region, Georgetown University professor Charles King describes a recurring pattern of upheaval and confrontation. |
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 DOMBAI, Karachayevo-Cherkessia — High up on the slopes of this idyllic mountain retreat, it is easy to forget that the ski resort of Dombai lies at the heart of the volatile North Caucasus. The resort is struggling to throw off the association with the troubles of neighboring republics, and foreign and Moscow-based investors are still wary of committing to the predominantly Muslim Caucasus republic. |
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 HARARE — Zimbabwe’s High Court said on Monday it has jurisdiction to decide on an opposition bid to force the release of presidential election results, but delayed the case until Tuesday, an opposition lawyer said. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has been trying since Saturday to accelerate release of the results, saying its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai won the election and should be declared president, ending the 28-year rule of Robert Mugabe. |
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BAGHDAD — The prime minister issued his strongest warning yet to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to disband his Mahdi Army militia or face political isolation. |
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BOSASSO, Somalia — Pirates who hijacked a luxury French yacht off Somalia last week have opened fire at local gunmen who stopped them from coming ashore in the chaotic Horn of Africa nation, witnesses said on Monday. The Ponant was seized on Friday with its 30-strong crew as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden. |
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CANBERRA — An Australian man and his adult daughter went public about their relationship after having a baby together, as new revelations emerged on Monday that a previous child of the couple died a few days after birth. |
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BEIJING — A Chinese hair salon has been shut down and fined 500,000 yuan ($69,000) for holding two customers hostage and charging wildly excessive fees for haircuts, a newspaper reported on Monday. College students Zhang Yi and Yuan Sha Sha went for a haircut at Baolou International Beauty Salon in Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan, expecting to pay the 38 yuan ($5. |
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VIDNOYE, Moscow Oblast — He can’t keep his backside on the bench, not when the clock is running and one of his stars is dribbling down the lane. He bounds to his feet, frizzy mullet springing crazily around his ears, eyes locked on his girls, Diana, Tina, Sue, the players he lured from the U. |
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LONDON — The English Premier League is odds-on to provide three of the four Champions League semifinalists for the second successive season this week, with Barcelona on course to complete the quartet. |
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Champions Zenit St. Petersburg continued a patchy opening to the season with a 2-2 draw at struggling Shinnik Yaroslavl on Sunday that left them in the bottom half of the table. It was a downbeat conclusion to a busy week for the team that saw a 4-1 rout over Bayer Leverkusen that puts it to the brink of a place in the UEFA Cup semi-finals for the first time. Striker Andrei Arshavin, who scored the opening goal in Germany on Thursday, also ran in the Olympic Torch relay through St. Petersburg on Saturday and celebrated the birth of a baby daughter earlier in the week. In other weekend matches in the Premier League, Rubin Kazan stretched their perfect start to four matches after goals from defender Dato Kvirkvelia and Sergei Semak helped them to a 2-1 home win over Tomsk. |
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 LONDON — Cardiff City will play Portsmouth in this season’s FA Cup final after a stunning goal from midfielder Joe Ledley gave them a 1-0 win over Barnsley in Sunday’s semi-final at Wembley Stadium. |
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MANAMA — Felipe Massa won the Bahrain Grand Prix on Sunday as the desert circuit kick-started his Formula One championship challenge for the second year in a row. The Brazilian had failed to score a point in the first two races of the year, an even worse performance than last season’s disappointing start, but the track again delivered the result he needed. |
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