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MOSCOW — In a double dose of good news, the European Union agreed Wednesday to start long-delayed partnership talks with Russia, and the next EU president, France, said it was keen to improve relations. President Dmitry Medvedev and visiting French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner discussed ways to improve EU-Russia ties during France’s six-month EU presidency, which begins July 1. |
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Panic gripped many in the city Wednesday after rumors spread that a serious accident had happened at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station (LAES) in Sosnovy Bor, a town 70 kilometers west of St. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court denied bail Wednesday to Sergei Storchak, the deputy finance minister who has been held in pretrial detention on corruption charges since November. The appeal, which took place in a small courtroom in the Moscow City Court in the northwest of the city, was packed with friends and relatives of the defendant. |
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MOSCOW — The trial of a World War II Red Army veteran on charges of genocide in Estonia has drawn angry charges from the Foreign Ministry and promises from State Duma deputies on Wednesday that they will issue a formal condemnation of the case. |
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LONDON — The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich is the mystery buyer of two paintings by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud that sold for record prices at auction this week, The Art Newspaper said on its website. It said Abramovich, 41, who owns English Premier League football side Chelsea, bought Bacon’s “Triptych”, which sold for $86. |
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TBILISI, Georgia — Partial returns Thursday and an exit poll showed President Mikhail Saakashvili’s ruling party heading for a strong majority in Georgia’s parliamentary election, drawing a challenge from his opponents. |
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A former teacher of President Dmitry Medvedev and head of the Law Department at St. Petersburg State University or SPbGU, was elected Wednesday to head the university, one of Russia’s leading higher educational institutions. Nikolai Kropachyov was welcomed to the post by the former head of SPbGU, Lyudmila Verbitskaya. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom has sold its majority stake in the Izvestia newspaper to a firm linked to a businessman believed to be a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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 The developer Vasily Sopromadze plans to sell the Vanity boutique complex located at 3 Kazanskaya Ulitsa for $80 million at a Property Fund auction. Sopromadze expects to sign a contract with the St. Petersburg Property Fund next week for the sale of the building. |
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Prisma Plans 2nd Store n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Finland’s SOK Corporation is to open a second Prisma hypermarket in St. Petersburg in the autumn. The hypermarket will cover about 8,500 square meters and will be located in a new shopping center in the Leningrad Oblast. |
 The antimonopoly service has refused to approve a plan by Singapore-based electronics producer Flextronics to build a plant worth $50 million due to a lack of information about the investor. In a Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) ruling dated May 5 and published on Wednesday, the FAS refused an application by Flextronics’ Austrian subsidiary, Flextronics International, to buy 100 percent of Elcoteq, on the basis that Flextronics failed to present data about its beneficiaries. |
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At long last, Russian women won’t have to make an extra trip to France, Germany or Japan to dress American. Gap Inc. said Tuesday that it had struck a franchise deal with Turkish bank Fiba Holding to bring its popular Gap and Banana Republic brands to Russia. |
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 Like one of those dark mysterious beech forests of the Caucasus, Chechnya still contains many secrets and most of what is going on there is hidden from outside view. From a distance, it looks as though war is over and the republic’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, is firmly in control. |
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Terrorist leaders in the North Caucuses have received a new infusion of money, Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Yedelev announced last week in Nalchik. It was a kind of international tranche and “money from kidnappings,” Yedelev said. |
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 A memoir by jazz journalist and promoter Alexander Kan, published by the local publisher Amphora, is called “Poka Ne Nachalsya Jazz,” which means, literally, “Until Jazz Starts,” but the author himself prefers to translate it as “Waiting for Jazz.” A reference to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Kan’s translation underpins the absurdity of underground cultural activities and life in general under the Soviets during the Cold War, of what was officially called “brotherly help to the people of Afghanistan” during the bloody Afghan War (1979-1989) and of ailing Soviet leaders who died in quick succession until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. |
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KISS will finally arrive in Russia for the first time and perform at the Ice Palace on Monday. The U.S. 1970s rock veterans did not make it when they were scheduled to perform two concerts in Moscow and one in St. |
 Jason Webley’s most recent concert in St. Petersburg early last year — organized by a local promoter at the highly inappropriate bar called XXXXII — was a disaster, but it the wasn’t fault of the Seattle-based singer-songwriter and accordion player who returns to the city with a vengeance this week. During the past 12 months, Webley released a new CD, “The Cost of Living,” his first solo album in more than three years, which he describes as “darker and more solid than anything I’ve ever done,” and collaborated with Amanda Palmer, the frontwoman of Boston’s Brechtian punk cabaret band The Dresden Dolls, on a music project by conjoined twin sisters, both named Evelyn, while a Mexican ballet troupe has staged a ballet to his music. |
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 Looking at the posters of the Mikhailovsky Theater’s Tuesday premiere of “L’Elisir d’Amore” (1832) by Domenico Donizetti, featuring the theater’s Vladimir Kekhman in costume as a conductor, the audience might think that he actually appears in the production. |
 BELGRADE — The controversial Irish entry for this year’s Eurovision song contest, a purple-beaked glove puppet called Dustin the Turkey, has already been plucked from the competition by unimpressed voters. Dustin’s gravelly-voiced rendition of “Irelande Douze Pointe,” a high-tempo electronic song, never really took off and he was summarily dumped at the contest’s first semi-final stage on Tuesday evening in the Serbian capital. |
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 Swiss director Eric Bergkraut doesn’t expect his latest film, “Letter to Anna,” to go down well in Russia, or even to make it into theaters. But in an interview after the premiere of the feature-length version at the Hot Docs International Film Festival in Toronto, he said he didn’t want his film to be perceived as “anti-Russian. |
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MOSCOW — Manchester United were crowned kings of Europe for the third time on Wednesday when they beat Chelsea 6-5 on penalties after a breathless all-English Champions League final had finished 1-1 after extra time. United’s 37-year-old goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar, appearing in his third final 13 years after his first with Ajax Amsterdam, saved the decisive spot kick from substitute Nicolas Anelka. |
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MOSCOW — Thousands of police patroled the streets of Moscow on Wednesday amid fears of violence as some 50,000 English football fans descended on the Russian capital for the Champions League final. |
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MOSCOW — The one cloud on Manchester United’s horizon after their Champions League triumph here is the continuing uncertainty over the future of their most valuable asset, Cristiano Ronaldo. As he has done consistently for the last year, the 23-year-old winger issued mixed messages about his future plans in the aftermath of what was a rollercoaster night for him in the Luzhniki Stadium. |
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